I’m getting a surprising result. I have created a Today perspective in OF 2 on my Mac. In addition to the actions that show up there, I’m also seeing two Projects, neither of which have any actions assigned to them at this point.
My Today perspective is set up as follows: Don’t use project hierarchy; Group actions by Ungrouped; Sort actions by Due; Use Preferences; Filter by status Any Status; Filter by availability Available; Filter by duration Any Duration; Filter contexts Remaining. (No selection for Focus or Sidebar Selection.)
The two projects in question show up as Parallel, no context, no flag, Active, with no defer date, no due date, no repeat. In other words, they were projects I created when I created the actions under them, but for now they have no actions assigned to them.
What I expected/intended was that Projects without any uncompleted actions would not appear in my Today perspective. I only want actionable items to show up there.
What am I doing wrong (or not understanding about this)"?
This is normal behavior, sequential and parallel projects without actions will show up as tasks in all places where tasks would. This is usually considered to be a feature. For example, suppose you had a project with a due date, but no actions. If projects didn’t behave in this way, they’d never show up on a perspective that showed things due (such as the forecast view) if you had no defined next actions, and nothing would trigger you that the project was due, which would be bad. It’s also consistent with the behavior you’d expect with action groups, which are similar to projects in many ways.
So your options here are to:
Complete or drop the project, if it’s over
Add a next action, if it’s still active
Defer it or put it on hold if the reason it has no next actions because you’re actually not going to work on it just now
A project without a definable outcome should be set up as a single actions list, not as a parallel project. Single actions lists projects will not show up in your tasks in this way, this is a key way that they differ from sequential and parallel projects.
