Reordering of projects and tasks please

PRO

siraj 12/02/2013 08:42

Platform:All

I really need this feature as without it, it is so difficult to prioritize my projects and tasks in my TodoList. I come from the GTD tool Nirvana which allows us to sort the order of tasks and projects in anylist. Doit allows the reordering only in DoitNow list - it is a pity that i have to add items to this list just to order them. Since the functionality is implemented in one area, it should not be difficult to make it available in other areas. Can you please do it?

Reordering of Projects is a high-priority item for me. If there are some workaround to let me reorder before you implement the feature, please let me know.

Folke post on 12/02/2013 09:10#1

PRO

@siraj

I agree that manual sorting is important, especially of projects within goals, tasks within projects and subtasks within tasks - in other words where a firm or half-firm natural sequence of doing is inherent. And Doit have said they will have this included in the Dec 22 release :-)

As for the Next list and other "consolidated" (cross-project) lists, I have come to prefer a more "automatic" approach by relying on the priority feature in conjunction with the various grouping options that are available (group by context, project etc). This is how I use priority in a way that I believe tallies with GTD: http://help.doit.im/group/topic/55

What I think is still missing in the manual ordering and planning of goals, projects etc is a convenient inactivation feature of tasks etc that are in the future "pipeline", i.e. the "subsequent" tasks are are not yet ripe for being shown on the Next and Waiting lists. Here is my current workaround for that : http://help.doit.im/group/topic/43 Several feature suggestions have been made, and perhaps the simplest and most flexible solution is to just have a horizontal line or heading within each project (or goal), where items under the line are not shown on the current consolidated lists (Next,Waiting etc). Doit have responded favorable to the idea, but have not committed to a time of implementation.
siraj post on 12/02/2013 10:44#2

PRO

@Folke,

Thanks a lot for the excellent suggestions. I am happy to see that you have also come from Nirvana. I have not used Priority that much at all so far. Now with your excellent suggestion, let me try it for a week and see how it goes. Having a Low Priority area within the Next list sounds very good for me. But I don't use Contexts that much as I feel that it does not add much value - you mentioned that you set up context and priority for every item you plan to work on. can you please share some more details on your workflow? Your ideas and thought-processes are very interesting. Thanks for sharing them on the forum.

How do you the set the priority to Medium by default? I don't remember seeing a new item defaults in the preferences area.
Folke post on 12/02/2013 12:44#3

PRO

@siraj

I think every app requires a few workarounds, and Doit certainly is no exception. Let me try to explain my workarounds for Contexts and for default Priority.

DEFAULT PRIORITY

Unfortunately, you simply cannot set the default Priority - it is None, whether you like it or not. So what I do is two things.
1) I try to remember to set the Priority manually to Medium for all new tasks (unless I am very sure that it should be High or Low). (But I never use No Priority as a priority)

2) I try to catch entry errors (forgotten to apply a priority) by having a combination of yet another habit, and a saved filter and a general organization principle. This setup is not watertight, but it seems to help a lot. It goes like this:
- I put all tasks in projects; those tasks do not belong in projects I keep in AoR folders, for which I use the project feature. This is something I like to do for many reasons - it is not just for catching entry errors.
- I try to make it a habit, when entering tasks, to apply the project last of all (so that if I forget to select Medium priority I probably also forget to select a project)
- I have a saved filter called Sloppy, which shows me tasks that have no project

Usually, this catches most of my entry errors. It would be much smoother, of course, if I could set the priority to be Medium by default. I have suggested this, but unfortunately it has not been received favorably by Doit.

(In case you are wondering why I do not simply have a saved filter for No Priority, the answer is that I make active use of No Priority as a vital part of another workaround that I use for subsequent, still inactive tasks. This means I have too many of those No Priority tasks all in all to be able to notice if one of them got its No Priority by sheer accident.)

CONTEXTS

I agree that the artificial split between Contexts and Tags causes problems, and, just like you, I initially also considered not using Contexts at all. But I have found the grouping feature to be very practical, so what I is this: I have a few (only half a dozen) "main contexts" defined as Contexts, and all other contexts defined as Tags. For example I have a Context called @Person, which allows me to see all tasks that depend on somebody else's participation (face-to face or by phone, chat etc), and I can see all these together in one list group. But if I want to find tasks that depend specifically on John or Alice or a Lawyer I use Tags for that.

Being able to group things by Context is something I have come to value highly, but I think the Tags and Context features could be much better harmonized and be made much more convenient to use. It is quite awkward now. But for example, one super-simple solution would be if you were allowed to assign Tags to your Contexts, and let these Tags be automatically inherited by all tasks that have that Context. This very simple solution alone would be enough to allow you to define Tags with the same names as your Contexts, and make those Context-Tags available in the tag bar for ad hoc quick filtering. This would also allow you to assign these same Context-Tags as secondary, additional, contexts to other tasks that have a different "main context" ("list group"). All in all, you would then have both a firm and clear list grouping capability and a universal ah hoc context filtering capability regardless of whether the individual context is defined as a Tag or as a Context.

What do you think of this?
wendy_only post on 12/03/2013 03:44#5

PRO

@siraj

Hi,

We will offer manual sorting in the next version which is planed to be released in this month.

Best regards,
Doit.im Team
siraj post on 12/03/2013 06:49#6

PRO

@Folke, thank you so much for spending time to write such a detailed post. I have started following your suggestion yesterday and it felt a little bit unnatural and overwhelming. But I know that this feeling will pass - So, I wanna give these suggestions also a shot and will post questions when I need more help. Thank you so much again!
siraj post on 12/03/2013 06:51#7

PRO

@Folke Would you mind sharing the AoRs that you use? How many projects and AoR do you have on an average? Somehow, I find it difficult to manage many projects in Doit as compared to Nirvana.

Thanks for the excellent suggestion on using a @Person context to group one-on-ones, was struggling with this myself - fantastic idea! Gonna apply it immediately
Folke post on 12/03/2013 11:49#8

PRO

@siraj

About the priority and defaults, in reality I seldom have any trouble with this. The input screen is so clear - with project, context and priority next to each other - that I very rarely forget to set the Priority to Medium. So I think you can relax. But it feels safe to have the "safety catches" in place, and best of all would be to have a proper default. Please let me know how it works.

About AoRs, I just wrote this piece for you and for any others who might have use for it. Hope it helps: http://help.doit.im/group/topic/60

As for the number of projects etc, I very much like the huge potential of the Goals feature. I group all my projects under Goals (four of them currently, two of which are "permanent" groups of AoRs) which makes it all much clearer, but I am still lacking some features to be able to plan ahead more conveniently for one Goal at a time, and to group/filter accordingly in the consolidated lists.
siraj post on 12/04/2013 08:22#9

PRO

@Folke, thanks a lot for taking the time to write about AoRs. Even I use roles as AoR mostly. I prefix all my AoRs with a 'z' so that they are sorted at the bottom. I use 12 AoRs now - let me see whether I need to trim them down over a period of time.

So far, I have not used the Goals feature much as I found it a bit unintuitive to use. After reading your comment, I tried to figure out how to assign an existing task/project to a Goal - I finally found it. Let me try to see whether I can use it well. If I have a task in an AoR, then I can't add it to a Goal which I find to be limiting. That means, I can use Goals to group my projects only - I am not sure how helpful it would be. Anyway, it is better for me to now stick with the new set of changes I have done to my workflow based on your suggestions and see how they go. I want to stabilize this before I try more changes.

It is interesting to see that you and I have a lot in common (consulting business, educational interesting) :)
Folke post on 12/04/2013 10:25#10

PRO

@siraj

Yes, lots of similarities between us, apparently :-)

Doit's Goals feature is not fully developed, but holds a promising potential and can be of some good use even as it is now.

I now have everything organized under only four Goals, and I keep the Goals section of the left menu always open. This gives me a good mental reminder of my overall "focus in life". The Projects section in the left menu I keep closed most of the time, because it is too long. And it is almost as quick (two clicks) to get to any given project by first clicking a Goal and then a Project within that Goal as it is to first open the long Projects section of the left menu and then find and click a particular Project there. Each of my Goals typically contains both a number of "real" projects and a number of "phony" (AoR) projects, but I do not have any single actions anywhere that do not belong to a project (either a real project on or an AoR project). (Doit allows you to put single actions straight under a Goal, if you like, but I do not use that.)

I agree with you that collecting single actions in AoR projects does not solve everything. The "real" projects, too, usually belong to an AoR, and there is no way to "tag" the projects accordingly. One (easy!?) way to solve this would be if Doit had inheritable tags, like Nirvana. Then you could simply tag both the "AoR single actions project" and all the real projects in this AoR with the same AoR Tag and use this Tag for filtering. http://help.doit.im/topics/2210.

Other "missing features" in the Goals functionality are:

- the fact that you cannot always see clearly in the lists to which Goal a Project (or Task) belongs

- the fact that you cannot "quick jump" between the various Projects within the same Goal. (The list of Goal-specific Projects would then need to be visible while you look at any particular one of them - for example either in the left menu as an indented project list under the currently selected Goal, or as a separate "second left pane" within the current main pane.)

- the fact that you cannot view all the tasks within a given Goal on one screen (like a Project view, but for everything in the whole Goal; as it is now, all you can see when you click on a Goal is the lists of Projects within it)

I think the Doit team are quite busy now with other things, and I have not contemplated these things enough to make any concrete suggestions. But the Goals feature could definitely be turned into an extremely powerful feature. I would hope soon.
siraj post on 12/05/2013 07:50#11

PRO

@Folke,
Thanks a lot Folke. Excellent set of suggestions and thoughts. I second your opinion on inheritable tags as I also expected to see it by default in Doit. Thanks a lot once again for all your time and effort - I would give you an update after a week to tell you how things with implementing some of your suggestions. have a nice day and bye Folke
baroldgene post on 05/02/2014 18:37#12

PRO

Please, please PLEASE allow drag and drop re-ordering. Quite honestly I don't understand how this feature wasn't in the first round of development. I'd love to get off of Things and use this app, but without manual ordering it is simply not useful for me.
wendy_only post on 05/03/2014 14:46#13

PRO

@baroldgene
Hi,

You can manual sort subtasks,tasks in Next box and Next group,tasks in Doit Now,projects,contexts and goals now. Could you please tell the version you use so that I can tell you how to operate?
Festus post on 08/24/2014 18:49#14

PRO

I still cannot manually reorder sub tasks in either the app on my mac or the online version. You clearly said that this would be implemented. What is going on?

Regards
Festus post on 08/24/2014 19:02#15

PRO

@Festus NB: This is within my starred/today list.
wendy_only post on 08/25/2014 08:27#16

PRO

@Festus
Hi,

In V4 versions,you can drag items to manually adjust the subtask in the order of the list.
See the pic: http://faq.doit.im/web.html#102

Could you please tell me the version number of your apps?

Best regards,
Doit.im Team
PhuDaiSu post on 09/16/2014 01:36#17

PRO

@Doit.im

Hi,

I am using v4 version (on web). So I can not still reordering task on Today Box? But I can do it on Next Box?

Can you setup this feature for Today Box?

Thank you very much.
wendy_only post on 09/16/2014 02:05#18

PRO

@PhuDaiSu
Hi,

This feature is not in our developing plan yet.

In Today box, you can reorder tasks in Doit Now. You'd better set tasks Doit Now and manually sort them.

Best regards,
Doit.im Team
PhuDaiSu post on 09/16/2014 03:32#19

PRO

@wendy_only
Thanks for your answer.

I think (at least) the order of today tasks must be the same to next-box tasks. But they are not.

On my project next box, I plan what to do first and what to do after... But when these tasks be move into today-box, the order of them is not like as before. So, my plan is broken, I can not to know what to do first and after.

May you consider to put this feature on your developing plan. And let me know when it will release?

Many thanks.
wendy_only post on 09/17/2014 08:09#20

PRO

@PhuDaiSu
Hi,

Could you please tell me how you order your tasks in Next? What information would you usually consider?

Best regards,
Doit.im Team