When I give multiple tags to tasks it is easy to have a cluttered view of things in custom perspectives. The only partial solution is to group by “Tags (sorted),” but this makes for a very fragmented perspective with way too much information.
What I’d really like is to be able to only have a perspective include certain tags and just ignore the others.
For example, let’s say that I have two tags: a “Home” tag which indicates a context needed to complete the task, and “High Priority” to show its importance. I would ideally like to have two separate custom perspectives: one for ‘contexts’ and the other for ‘importance.’
Take the former for a moment (a custom perspective focusing on ‘context’). As things stand now, there’s no way to group by only those tags and not every tag a task with those tags also happens to have. I could list the task twice under separate “Home” and “High Priority” groupings and manually collapse the second. (However, if I created a counterpart perspective I would constantly be collapsing and expanding multiple tags because the settings are unhelpfully remembered across perspectives.) The only other option is to only list tasks once, but for each unique combinations of tags to have its listing. This is not very useful to quickly check what tasks I could accomplish at “Home” in a single list and hide distractions.
Again, what would be helpful is to create a perspective that lets me select certain tags to include (like my ‘contexts’) and to simply not group tasks based on other tags which would be irrelevant to that perspective. For this example, a perspective to just group by the tags which I explicitly include as part of the perspective and ignore any others.
The lack of this ability has prevented me from getting into a Forecast tag, because adding another common tag like that would kill the usability of several custom perspectives that are important to me in this way.
I hope I made this clear without going on too long. I believe Ken alluded to this sort of thing during the iOS TestFlight, but v3.1 has arrived and I hadn’t heard anything new.
I am having a similar issue with my “Timely” Tags. I see all of the actions listed by both their context, and their timely tag. It’s cluttered.
When I am reviewing my actions, I want to see them organized only by Timely Tags so I can prioritize, and when I am working on them I only want to see them organized by the context tags. I have a custom perspective for each.
I have found a work around, but its fussy. and only works on the Mac, not iOS. If I select the tags I want to see in the sidebar, It limits the action list to only those tags, solving the clutter issue. What would be nice is if the perspective would remember my sidebar selection, like it could in v2.
Oddly, some of my perspectives that came from v2 and were upgraded, retained their sidebar selection, but it cannot be changed and re-saved. Bug?
I’ve thought about this a bit more. I’d like the option to have a perspective save one of the following —
Select These Tags or Omit These Tags — an example:
When I want to see my actions by their timely tags, I would have that perspective select the timely tags
When I want to see my actions by their context tags, I would have the perspective select everything but the timely tags
Yep. I have also reported this. For example, I have tasks which I can do at a certain time at my home office (which has its own tag) or at a certain time at work (which has also got its own tag). I have several important perspectives which group tasks by context—these are now cluttered by task groups for tags which are irrelevant in that context: the home office section shows up in my work perspective and the other way around.
The response of the support team is that there’s currently no workaround if you use more than one tag. I’d also love an option in the filter settings to ignore other tags / include only selected tags.
It sounded like this was something being planned to be implemented sooner or later. Does anyone have any inside scoop on a timetable or level of priority it may have?
I would love to have a Today tag but it would obliterate most of my custom perspectives.
I agree. There does not seem to be a way to do this. This discourages the use of multiple tags. For me, it is a very limiting factor in the custom perspectives I am making. I’m looking forward to someone discovering a workaround or a developer update.
Is anyone in the know about the status of this concept? I wonder if anyone reading is in a position to comment on whether it is being targeted for an upcoming release.
Has anyone found a workaround for this? My custom perspectives are becoming difficult to look at. My eye goes straight to the bold print, and not the task. It’s actually extra work to focus on the list.
This issue is becoming a dealbreaker for me. I have created perspectives to only show tasks tagged with a particular tag - e.g. “Rituals (Afternoon)”, but the perspective also displays all the tags that the included tasks are also tagged with. Furthermore, on iOS, the Perspective won’t even show the tasks automatically - I have to tap on the tag in the list to display it. This is so frustrating. Tags weere meant to provide flexibility, but they do not work as you would expect. Please fix!
In the above example the perspective should only show tasks tagged “Rituals (Afternoon)” but other tags that the tasks are tagged with are also being shown. Also to get the “Rituals (Afternoon)” tags to display I have to tap the little arrow next to the tag, every time.
It would be really great if there was an additional option in the ‘Group actions by:’ setting — ‘Tags (Selected)’ which would show the same tag picker control as in the Filter Rules.
I would use this for a few edge case perspectives where it would be nice and tidy to have groups for only a few tags (typically a breakdown by priority).
@saltedlolly For your specific ‘Ritual’ use case, I assume you would like to see a simple list of things to do at the right time. In your perspective you could group actions by something other than tags, eg. use ‘Group and sort: Entire Projects’ or ‘Group actions by: Ungrouped’?
I hate to sound like a nag or a complainer, but I’m really anticipating the day when this is a reality. Up until that point I’m not able to use a Today tag or branch much out into using multiple tags because the custom perspectives I rely on would become unusable. So I’m pretty much doing things the old way (a lot of Flag+Defer).
I don’t suppose anyone has any word about the status of this idea.
Yes, it’s high on my wish list too. But the other things that have been shipped are valuable too and fit with a sophisticated productivity tool: support for new iOS capabilities, automation, time zone management, etc.
