Treat Projects as Containers

[msalam]

It has long been a great annoyance for me that OF doesn’t treat a project as a “container” of tasks. As an example of why this annoys me: Where I have a project with 20 tasks. If I set the project to be due (or deferred …or worse yet deferred and due) on a specific day…all 20 tasks show up in forecast…and the actual project name is like at the end. Why cant it just show me the Project itself is due…and let me drill into it?

Or am I just doing this all wrong?

[TheOldDesigner]

If your trying to see projects which are due yes you are doing it wrong😀

For that a custom perspective would be a better fit.

Personally I hardly ever set due dates, use a “today” perspective set to exclude projects and groups and just show me what is deferred or due today.

I actually just show my Eisenhower Matrix and communication tagged tasks and use meta tasks like “complete project x” to keep my list from looking overwhelming. Project details are usually dealt with via focussed perspectives. For me the forecast is little more than a check at the end of the day/week to make sure nothing has been missed.

[Monika]

Your problem is solved in a few minutes with a self-created perspective “FORECAST”:

“Verfügbarkeit: übrig” means “Availability: Remaining”
“Status: Bald fällig” means “Status: Due soon”
“Ist weder Projekt noch Gruppe” means “is not a project or group”.

[MultiDim]

You’re not doing it wrong. Forecast behaves like perspectives of type ‘Individual Actions’, which surface all the matching actions in a flat list and (with certain sort orders) places parent actions/projects after their child actions (because if you are completing them one by one the parent action becomes available last).

It’s often been requested to be able to have a different presentation in Forecast. For example, automatically grouping branches of actions, so that you can collapse ‘checklists’ of parallel actions.

The only way to avoid seeing all individual actions in Forecast is for them to not have a due date. This means you can’t give the project a due date, and you must create a separate task which represents ‘finish the project X by due date D’. This task could be the first task in the project, or placed outside the project (and it points to it by including a link in the notes).

See also this thread:

Show tasks with sub-tasks

I agree that putting the main ‘do the packing’ action as a parent of the checklist items doesn’t work, for the reasons @ditw gave. Instead you could structure a project as below if you’re using a ‘list’ tag. The due date must be only on the main action, so that it’s the only one to appear in Forecast. A defer date can be on the whole project (I’m assuming that you don’t use ‘Show deferred items’ in Forecast, which I don’t recommend in general). [Pack for trip 1] My preference though is for t…

[msalam]

Thanks all for replying. Not putting a date on the project and instead on a task that represents closure makes sense as a workaround. Will give it a try. Thanks!