Hi, I have a sequential project with an end date, with tasks that don’t have individual end dates. These are lesson plans that all have to be written by the project end date.
I’d like each one to appear in the deferred section of Forecast, once the previous one has been marked complete, but If I set the first task defer date to today I just get that one and then when it is marked complete I don’t get a “start date” for the next one. If I mark the project with a deferred date, I get the whole set of tasks in defer straight away. I could create arbitrary defer date, say weekly, for each task, but that doesn’t reflect life, sometimes I can do several in a day and sometimes none all week.
Please could you advise how can I get around this, or am I expecting too much, and I’ll just have to remember to set the next action defer date when I complete the current tasks
You can’t set deferred dates based on the completion date of another task. For what you want to do, setting the defer dates manually is your only option.
The real answer is that forecast view just isn’t the right view for this kind of thing. It sounds as if what you want to happen is for the next task in a sequential project to appear as soon as you complete the task before it. This is exactly the behavior you get with sequential projects in a normal perspective or projects/contexts view when you set the visibility to “available”, without needing to set defer dates at all, so that’s really the correct way to view these kinds of things.
The forecast view is a forecast. Even if you got this to work for the current day, how would it work for your future tasks? If you’re not setting the defer date manually, and you want it to depend on the completion of the previous task, OF fundamentally couldn’t possibly put these future tasks into the forecast, because it has no idea when you’re going to complete all your previous tasks, so it wouldn’t know what date to give them.
Thanks for that, I’ll sit down tonight and see if I can devise a perspective that suits me better. I may also need to rethink contexts and how I use them, they haven’t really worked for me since I semi-retired and most stuff is done at home.
