Hi, Laurence. I can't comment too far because I don't know anything about the Forster methodology but I have some advice about effective use of MLO.
One of the challenges with any task manager is to ensure that the productivity gains outweigh the time you spend managing and tweaking the tool. It seems to me that the time you spend manually reordering your tasks would be a problem and I would want to find a way to let MLO do that for me. First, you need to be clear on the difference between actually reordering the tasks in your outline, versus re-sorting the order in which they appear in a view. One of the most compelling advantages of MLO is the availability of powerful tools for defining views. If you can define a view that shows the tasks in the order you want then you dont have to re-order the outline. This involves coming up with some sort of a of rule that describes the order you want for your tasks. The starred view is an exception; it handles the case where your rules put some task low in your list but you know that it has to be done right away, so you tick the star. Since we are already looking at situations that are exceptions to the rules, you can't write a rule to put these exceptions into an order, so you often have to use a manual sort, and for this view (only) MLO synchs the manual order between platforms. But if you are starring and manually sorting all of your tasks it would seem that you are underutilizing the power of MLO. You made several mentions of moving something to the bottom of the list. I use a FIFO queue for this type of thing. Create a view that includes all the tasks that you want to see but maybe in the wrong order. Then sort the view in ascending order by date modified. The tasks that have been in the queue the longest will be at the top. Whenever a new task becomes included it should appear at the bottom. If a task that's at the top or in the middle needs to go to the bottom, just make a change to it. For example, add a blankspace to the end of the title. This causes the modified date to reset to "now" and your task instantly sinks to the bottom of the view. Similarly, instead of dragging your work folder to a hidden branch when work ends, how about finding a way that MLP can tell whether you are working and adjust automatically. One way to do this is by scheduling it. In the Hours tab of the context definition for the @work context, set up the hours of each day of the week that you are normally working. Your tasks with the context @work will appear on your task list each workday morning and go hidden each workday evening. You can define an @home context that's open whenever @work is closed. Another approach would be to do it by location. Associate your @work context with the location of your workplace and do the same with your home, then use the Nearby view. Windows doesn't support Nearby yet but I dont find that a problem. I mainly use MLO/Windows for planning and organizing my tasks, where my current location doesn't really matter much, and i use my phone for when i am working on my tasks. Read the secton of the mlo users guide that gives the seven or so ways that a task can be inactive and look for ways to make your tasks active only when it is time to work on each one. One more small point. You mentioned that projects are underlined in blue on the phone. That blue line is actually a progress bar. -Dwight MLO Betazoid on Android SGN4 On Dec 16, 2015, Laurence Glazier <laurence.glaz...@gmail.com> wrote: >Thanks Nick, I will try that out. > >On Wednesday, December 16, 2015 at 1:40:24 PM UTC, Nick Clark wrote: >> >> I don't know the methodology you refer to, but have you tried >"playing" >> with the Importance and Urgency sliders in an Active Actions view? >These >> coupled with Context filters and context active times may achieve >most of >> what you describe. -- 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. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/5238fff3-f386-4330-a151-21e8254641b7%40dwightarthur.us. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
