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.

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