Why does moving a "Completed" action to a folder flip its status to "Active"

My workflow is to dump all incoming actions into a project called “Orders Up!” as a way to get around not being able to see my inbox and projects at the same time (Yay for 2.10 apparently fixing this!).

As I process these actions, I assign context and a due date and then drag them to the appropriate folder on the project left pane. It’s not uncommon that while processing these actions that something is already complete and I simply check-it as “Complete” and then move it into the appropriate folder or project inside a folder.

This is where things get interesting. If I move a completed action from my “Orders Up!” project into another project in a folder, the status of “Complete” stays the same. However, if I move a completed action from “Orders Up!” into just a folder (not a project inside a folder) it flips the status back to “Active.” Very annoying.

Here is my theory: When you move an action into a folder (not into an existing project inside that folder) that action becomes a project and in that process the status is automatically reset to “Active.”

I feel like this wasn’t always the case and only started happening I updated to 2.7 a few months ago. I’ve since updated to 2.9 and it’s still happening.

My question: Is there a setting to change this seemingly default behavior?

Thanks in advance for any ideas or tips. :)

Hey @dsmith! Great question, and your initial theory is spot-on: this is related to how OmniFocus promotes tasks to projects.

Unfortunately, at the moment there’s not a setting to change this behavior. However, one possible workaround exists: the new project will keep its Complete status if it’s created using the “Convert to Project” menu item, rather than drag & drop. (I think this menu item has a default keyboard shortcut of command-shift-1, making it that much easier to use.)

Nevertheless, if this is impeding your workflow, our support team would love to hear about it. Thanks for using OmniFocus!

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Thanks @tekl! Let me go try out this work around and report back.

Thanks again for the help here. The keyboard shortcut works, but unfortunately it automatically moves the action as a wholly new project outside of the “Orders Up” project I use as my catchall bucket. Not ideal. I did this en masse to about 45 actions and then moved them all back into my “Orders Up” bucket, but unfortunately I think that re-converted them to actions and I was back at square one.

Totally okay, I’ve made my own custom messy workflow here and just need to tinker with it a bit.

Thanks for the help. :)

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