+ 1

It really is very difficult to consider which Next actions to tentatively aim to do later today if you cannot see clearly which ones you have already chosen to aim for. (Because you probably want to pick matching tasks.)

In virtually all other apps this is so brilliantly simple. The star makes the task more visible in the list where it lives, so you can see which ones you have chosen and which ones you have not. And you can also see all starred tasks (from across all lists) on a special "starred" list (Today list). That's it. No more, no less.

If a task is actually FIRMLY scheduled for today it should live in Scheduled, and be visible in Scheduled until it is completed. Tasks scheduled for today or earlier days (overdue) could be automatically starred at midnight so that they will be automatically visible on the Today list. This would work for everybody - for both GTD adherents and for time planners and for any variation in between.

+ 10

I concur. I like Folke's suggestion above and definitely feel that the star needs to be returned.

+1

I don't know about losing customers but look at it this way - If you implement this the right way (as described by @Folke above) you will make the transition from a host of competing apps a LOT easier. This could open doit.im up for a lot of people who might find this particular part too cumbersome while trying out the free version.

+1

Okay, so I was a bit hasty saying may lose customers, you caught me in a particularly frustrated moment.

I am supportive of doit and plan to stick with it, I just wanted to make sure the support/developers realize how important this aspect is to many users. I think this is definitely clear from the above. Folkes description is spot on and I agree may mean the difference of potential new customers going pro.

@lisa_alway @khaberz @hntopper @Folke
Hi,

Thank you for your feedback. We are considering this issue now. We have redesigned the iPhone version to bring back some features.

Shall you need any help or have additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me back.

Thank you for your support!

Best regards,
Doit.im Team
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Group: http://help.doit.im/group/

BRILLIANT NEWS, I AM USING ANDROID VERSION, WEB, ipad AND WINDOWS so let me know when any of those may be updated. Happy to be a beta tester for any too! :)

@wendy_only

Hi,
I get excited, do you already have a release date for the iphone-update? (Strongly looking forward to it... ;-))
cc

> If a task is actually FIRMLY scheduled for today it should live in Scheduled, and be visible in Scheduled until it is completed.

No, it should live in "Today" if it's scheduled for today. If it's scheduled for tomorrow, it should live in "Tomorrow". If it's scheduled for any other day beyond tomorrow, then it should live in "Scheduled". If it is scheduled for a day prior to today, it should live in "Today".

The idea of Scheduled is that the tasks have a set date/time they must be performed and have been scheduled for then. You shouldn't be going into Scheduled to look for tasks to do today. You should be working out of your Today view (and in a more appropriate GTD system, you should be working only your Next Action tasks, but Doit drops the ball here by placing all taks into a "Next" state, which limits your ability to do this) and taking items from Today and Next as you close off items that you were supposed to complete today.

@JDavidCarr

I am afraid you are missing the point I am making, and I do not really believe we really have disagreement.

The tasks that are firmly scheduled for today (or in the past) should definitely be VISIBLE in Today. I think we agree on that.

However, the fact that they are firmly scheduled for a particular day (past, present, future) in fact make them Scheduled (calendar) tasks by definition (GTD), so they should have their "home" in Scheduled (calendar) and for convenience they should be automatically starred at midnight so that they are visible in Today AS WELL.

I hope we agree om this.

And it should be possible to star Next actions for attention Today without thereby having them moved off the Next list, as has been the case in Doit.

If you compare with GTD, the Today list should be the equivalent of the "white index card".

I reread your initial comment and your reply, and I'm not entirely sure we're in agreement.

I agree with your statement that a task scheduled for today should appear in Today - that was the gist of my initial comment. I see your point about it also appearing in scheduled (given a true GTD implementation that is paper-based, the task would appear both on today's index card and on my calendar as a scheduled item today) but in an electronic system, I would think it would complicate the organization of your data to have tasks appear in both palces. Certainly the time-based view for Today should be the equivelant of looking at today on your calendar (scheduled tasks). With this in mind, I think we're articulating the same principle, but I don't believe it would be beneficial to see a task appear in two time-based views.

To be fair, I also don't get the advantage of using the star. I've never used it and my curiousity about it is what led me to view this thread. I use doit now to identify and order priority tasks to work on "today" and I use my Today time-based view to select next tasks to work on when the priority ones are completed. Where does the star fit in?

Folke, I just re-read a few of the comments above and it sounds like the star is being used in the same way "Doit Now" was intended to be used. The latter is not available on all platforms (heh.. though neither is the star, I see) so I can see why people want access to "star" tasks.

JDavidCarr

I understand.

The "Doit Now" group (within Today) was always a subset of Doit's Today tasks. And Doit's starred tasks were always physically moved to Today - in other words removed from wherever they were. There never was a way in Doit to just "mark" (Star) tasks for your attention as you have in virtually all other apps. So the problem that I (and many others) suffer from were present even with the old Doit Now functionality.

For example, if you hope or aim to be able to do a certain next action today, or at least consider it seriously, then in normal apps you can star it, and that makes it visible both in Today and in Next (the star turned yellow). But no changes are made to the task as such. It is still a Next action and no other data or dates or anything about it are changed either.

But Doit strangely always transformed the actions from whatever they were into "scheduled for today" action (with a fixed start date of today, but for some reason hidden from the scheduled list but not from the scheduled calendar).

One of the main problems with Doit's implementation was that it was unnecessarily difficult to put together a suitable and matching set of Next actions to "aim" for today (i.e. star for your attention), because as soon as you starred a next action it totally disappeared from the Next list instead of being marked with a yellow star, so you could not see which ones you had already starred and which ones would be matching additional tasks. And when you later unstarred the task from the Today list (if you did not get a chance to do the task) it would end up in some new position within the Next list. And if you had starred, say, a Waiting For action (courier expected to arrive today; and you wanted to remain aware of this and stay close by) and then unstarred the task later (you received a message that the delivery will be two days late) the task would be moved into Next - totally weird! And of course the starred delivery would not even be visible among all the other Waiting For tasks during the time it was starred!

Very inelegant and complicated. All other apps have a much simpler and better solution. Star only means "more visible". No other changes.

If you look at it in strict GTD terms, the only kinds of tasks you can complete are either Next actions or Calendar actions. The vast majority are regular Next actions, as in GTD you do not normally schedule anything unless you absolutely must. This means that even if you have a Today list, which is very convenient invention, the tasks really cannot "live" there, only be shown there in addition to in their "home list" where they should always "live" and be be visible until they are completed, regardless of whether you star them or not. If you look at a given category list, then of course you want it to be complete.

The Today list should behave as just a "compilation" of all starred tasks of all kinds on all lists. If you want to be strict, that is. And if you want to be practical.

Here is a longer thread on this topic:
http://help.doit.im/topics/2015

My gripe has always been the lack of a single "Next Action" in a project. This is a foundational concept to GTD. The idea that all tasks become Nexts and the developer's recommendations that you can go through and manually change all the Nexts that are not your Next Action to Someday/Maybe almost made me go with one of the other systems I reviewed when I left todoMatrix.

JDavidCarr,

I agree that Doit does not do this properly. It is simply wrong to say that these "remaining" actions are Someday. There is no element of hesitation about them. And they are not "Scheduled" (neither Calendar or Tickler) nor Next nor Waiting For either. In "paper GTD" these "project plans" belong outside the regular GTD lists, in what is referred to as "project support material" along with budgets, brochures and what have you, and then you move tasks from those project plans onto your regular GTD lists as they become relevant. But if you have an electronic app, then obviously you would want to keep all tasks within the app - and without messing up your regular lists. So I agree with you.

I (and I believe you, too) have suggested several times that Doit should implement an "inactive" ("subsequent", "dependent") state for tasks is projects, which would make the tasks invisible everywhere except when looking directly at the project itself. Manual sorting would be very appropriate for this section of the project. And automated progression is a viable add-on.

As for the notion that there should be only one next action in a project, all I can say is I have no idea where this myth comes from and what has made it so widespread. David Allen emphasizes, over and over, that you must have AT LEAST one next action from EACH "MOVING PART" of the project.

In reality, I suppose we all know that in a real project there can be one or more tasks that are perfectly possible to do now, whereas the rest of the project's tasks would be in a "dependent" state - not possible until other things have been done.

It's not an incorrect assertion that there should be one Next Action to move a project forward. Next is specific, it refers to one item. In parallel project such as what you describe above, these could likely be better represented with several projects or sub-projects (a lot of practitioners demand this functionality, I don't like it).

From David Allen's web site:

"What is a Next Action?
A Next Action is your physical, visible next step. Some of these are project related, some are not. The recommendation is to sort these by context."

It describes one step in a project (or not in project, if they are single-action tasks) and it's THE next one you should perform.

I don't disagree that a project with parallel tasks could have more than one Next Action, but the requirement should be that it naturally has one (or at least one, however you want to describe that) and not that all of the tasks automatically become Nexts.

Again, I think we're saying essentially the same thing.

The terms "parallel" vs "sequential" projects do not exist (as far as I have ever seen) in Allen's own books, but seem to have been invented by software developers such as Omnigroup. It is a very crude distinction, because most real projects are neither fully parallel nor fully one-at-a-time sequential. You have a number of tasks that could be done now, and you have a bunch that cannot even be considered yet.

Here is a quite from book 1 (p 76):

"Decide on the next actions for each of the current moving parts of the project"

"A project is sufficiently planned for implementation when every next-action step has been decided on every front that can actually be moved on without some other component's having to be completed first."

As you say, I think we are essentially in need for the same feature - a way to "inactivate" all the dependent tasks in the project without having to pollute our Next list, Someday list, Waiting list or Scheduled list with them. They should be visible only with the project itself.

Hi all,

About the Star,we are considering to bring it back on the Mac and Windows versions. On iPhone and Android version,we do not have the plan yet. If you want it back,please tell us where the Star icon should be showed.

@wendy_only

This is my suggestion:

Next list:
A star is useful for seeing which tasks you have already starred and which ones you have not yet starred. It is an important indicator of which tasks you have already decided to pay attention to later today. Left placement is more common and better on wide screens.

Waiting, Someday, Scheduled:
Same as Next

Projects and Contexts (grouped by "box" or otherwise):
Starred tasks are shown with a yellow star with their respective "box group". for example within the Next box you have a mix of starred and non-starred tasks.

@Folke

Hi,

Do you mean that the Star is a mark which tells you that this task you need pay attention to later today?

@wendy_only

Yes. Exactly. Thank you for listening :-)

Yes, almost like a "tag", but a "tag" with some very special properties:

- it has its own special icon (star) always visible in a special fixed position on the task line
- it can easily be toggled on/off with a single click
- it has its own special "advanced filter" list called "Today", near the top of the left menu, which may have some special grouping and sorting features
- its toggling on/off leaves no trace in the task's revision history (no changes to last edited date or sorting order etc)
- it is automatically turned on at midnight for tasks that are calendared for today (or past days) and for tasks that have a deadline today (or past days)
- it can always be turned off and on manually for all tasks at any time, but will always be turned on again next midnight for those tasks that have a calendar date or deadline for today or earlier
- tasks that are calendared for today or earlier can always be found under Scheduled, regardless of whether their star is on or off

Thanks again for listening :-)

+1 on all of the above, would be so happy to have this functionality above. Thank you all for listening!

@lisa_alway @Folke
Hi,

We will consider it seriously as it is not a little issue for us and other users. Your suggestion will change the meaing of the "Star" which we define it.

this sounds great, thanks so much for your support.

@wendy_only

If you implement this I would be very, very happy already, and I do not want to burden you with more requests, but at the same time I want to at least mention a couple of useful things that you might want to consider as possible and useful add-ons, either now or later, either as standard features or as user preference options:

1) The above suggestion means that the "start date" will never be used at all for actions in Next, Waiting and Someday. It will not be affected by starring and unstarring. This means it is available for other uses.
It would be very useful for me (and I belive for many) to have this date automatically filled in - for information only - as a record of when I placed that task in that Box (Next, Waiting or Someday). For example, if John promises to send me some documentation, and I write that down as a Waiting For action (to keep of track of whether I get it or not) this date would show me since when I have been waiting. Similarly, if I promise John to do something for him and make it a Next action to do it, then it would be very practical to have that time stamp as a record of when I made that promise.

2) Auto-starring for attention can be extended to other things than just tasks calendared by today or with a deadline by today.
Some (perhaps many) people predominantly enter new tasks manually and make only sparse use of the Doit inbox and prefer immediate processing of it whenever this is possible. The likes of us would benefit from having a preference option for auto-starring everything that arrives in the Inbox. For us it would be is no distraction at all to see them in Today. On the contrary, it would help ensure that we do not miss them. And if we get too many or don't have the time now to process them, we can always un-star those that are not urgent.

I love the idea of the start date being auto-populated with a "created" timestamp. I think something like auto-starring should be a toggled setting, as I would prefer to NOT have to un-star items that are not urgent (which describes most of my tasks).

Apologies for my slow response, I have been ill,

I like all of folkes suggestion, but agree that JDavidCarrs mention of having the automatic star as a preference is very good, I think a lot more user control for preferences of this sort is necessary in the future, there is so little preference setting availalbe for the software, this could really add more flexibility for different users.