Hi I rather chuffed with this.
My other threads got confused, so let's start this again BACKGROUND RE-CAP: I am been trying to implement GTD on MLO. And because David Allen suggests that we have (in practice) quite so many 'Projects' and because in GTD method you need to create a Next Action for every one of your Projects, due to the large number of Next Actions (often between 60 and 120 at once) that you are likely to have running in parallel... due to these large numbers at once, choosing what to do next - i.e. establishing priority of actions - becomes hard. Yes, Weekly Reviews are crucial. Yes Daily Reviews are crucial (plus quick scans more than once a day if possible). And yes, using Context to tell you what you can do next '*right now'*' is also a helpful way to cut down the number of Next Actions you are likely to be faced with at once. HOWEVER, with such a large number of Next Actions any way you do it, you need to be 'on top of' a LOT of Projects at once, and I find it extremely easy to find myself NOT doing the things that my brain has told me several times are rather more Important and/or Urgent, than just ticking off easy stuff off that happens to be in front of me. To put this more strongly, with what I had until today it was far too easy to miss important/urgent (i.e. high priority) stuff, which can easily be a *total disaster*! Secondly I also get frustrated if the importance and urgency is held only at the *Action* level, because every time you tick off a Next Action, you are liable find you need to enter that Importance & Urgency all over again. And when up against the clock this simply may not happen! The truth for me at least, is that mostly it's the priority of completing Project itself that I need to keep on top of, rather than that of individual actions. THE MISSION: For the above reasons I wanted to be able to create a single view that showed: a) The one 'Next Action' for each live project b) To show me & allow me to edit the Importance & Urgency of the *project* to which each action belongs c) To *not* show the folders (as they get in the way) d) To also sort the entire view into priority order using Importance + Urgency of the Projects, so that the higher priority items are visible at the top of the page. f) To be able to *adjust* the Importance and Urgency in real time on the same screen and thereby change the sort order *in real time*. This means that the priorities can then to be to some extent as *relative* priorities (i.e. what is more high or low priority compared to what else) as well as being absolute values. THE SOLUTION After a several false starts and help from several directions (notably from Dwight and pottster) I think I this newbie here, may have cracked the problem. So I created a new View from scratch and I then did the following filter settings: Filter > General > "Show Actions: Next Actions" Filter > General > "Show Hierarchy: Yes" Filter > General > Include Parents - ticked Filter > General > Set parent filter to: "IsProject" Filter > Group & Sort > Advanced un-ticked Filter > Group & Sort > Group by > (none) Filter > Group & Sort > Sort > Computed-Score [descending] I then opened up the columns for Importance and for Urgency (plus Context for good measure) and save the view. After all this sweat it is now *semi-miraculous* to see it working! - A bonus is that you can hit F6 to just see all the projects, nicely sorted by a fusion (mostly) of Importance and Urgency. And F7 of course brings back all the Next Actions. - Another surprise is that it doesn't blow up with multi-level projects. When you hit F7 the project structure, complete with Next Actions appears all nicely indented. - Another bonus I discovered is that you can 'force' the addition of individual Actions into view if required, simply by ticking the Project button on the additional Action you want. - A nice surprise (to me) is that if you double click on an action, you are taken to the main Outline view to see all the other sibling Actions for the project... and double clicking again takes me back again. (Obviously you need to set up the new Workspace (i.e. tab) to sync selections for this to work. [clue right-click on tab name]. - What is also great is that the Importance and Urgency columns automatically change their visual 'markup' (ie. colour/boldness) depending on their value. This make the thing more visual, with bright bold red for the supplier important/urgent stuff etc. - I also like being able to do Alt/H to flag stuff up visually that is dead urgent too (in my case making that text go onto a bright yellow background). - But the best fun of all is twiddling with the Imporance and Urgency of a project and seeing the project instantly fly up and down my list of priorities depending on what values I put in. BRILLIANT ! :^)) No doubt something will go wrong or like a fool I will decide I need something different, but for now I'm basking in glory and am firmly chalking this up as a "rare victory" over technology ! Thanks chaps J -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mylifeorganized+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to mylifeorganized@googlegroups.com. 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