Before a little cartoon cloud filled with punctuation marks appears above your head, know that I am not about to write anything asserting that you should stop following up on loaned items, delegated projects, actions, etc. What I am going to write about is a better way to do it.
The Problem with Waiting-For
If you have a Waiting-For list in your own GTD setup, you may have noticed something annoying about it, especially if you are using a paper-based system as I did a few years ago. That book you loaned to a friend? Yeah, you look at that same line several times a day for weeks or even months even though you don’t really care when it is returned. That action you delegated to your boss that isn’t due until next week? Yeah, it looks back at you, stealing your attention when working through your contexts each day. And where exactly will this follow up occur? Via email? While running errands? Online? Isn’t that why we have contexts?
Perhaps you stored your Waiting-For list outside of your main method of flipping through contexts, on some kind of low-fi list. Maybe you placed the item from your boss on the Weekly Review list somewhere and will rethink it on Friday afternoon, placing a follow up action in a context or on your calendar. This just seems fiddly.
The Fix, Part One: Verbs in Context
The concept of “Waiting-For,” introduced as a list in Getting Things Done, is really more of a meta context list. “Deferred” is really “deferred until…” and the real action behind a Waiting-For item is a verb describing the follow up action. So instead of having a noun/person combo like “Dave: On the Road” to remind you that you loaned a Kerouac book to a friend, you can use “Call Dave re: On the Road” on your @calls list, placing a verb in context just as with the rest of your system.
The Fix, Part Two: Crouching Context, Hidden Action
Having a verb in context will mesh with the GTD flow in a better way. We don’t really need to see that Kerouac reminder until we’re able to make calls and we won’t look at the @calls context until we are able to actually, you know, pick up the phone. (Seeing this action on your phone is the subject of another post, getting closer…promise.) So now we need to simply deal with the problem of seeing that follow up action everytime we look at our @calls context from now until who-knows-when. We need to hide that action until we care. My tickler file used to take care of this. More recently, iCal has taken care of this for me. Somehow though, this just isn’t as smooth as it could be.
This is where Actiontastic and its wise users come into the picture. Quite a few blog comments and emails have rolled in about adding due dates and start dates to actions and projects, but my DEVONthink reference for this date mini-project just grew in size while not turning into any real code for the app. You see, “dates” have been on the brainstorming board for quite some time now, but I didn’t want to just toss them in a table. I wanted to add meaning to them, design them, and keep the app super simple. How will we view these items? Do they affect project ordering? What related filters are needed? So a daily fight has been taking place via paper sketches and electronic notes. A very recent email from Michael Grant pushed me over the edge regarding the relationship of dates to Waiting-For and I am now very close to adding a general concept of time to Actiontastic.
Right now, here is the plan (subject to coffee, design fits of fury, and of course change):
- Add a “pause” feature
- Add start dates
- Add due dates
Pause
The Great Koz mentioned pausing “blocked projects” as he calls them. Those are the kind of things where your Next Action depends on someone else or some outside event before it can be executed. His wish was to not see this action until later, thus Pausing. I agree. Seeing something on my Next Action list that I can’t do right now is distracting. So the plan is to add a simple “pause” button to Projects, Actions, Inbox Items, and maybe even Contexts (think about hiding your @errands list while you are sitting at your desk). This pause will not be based on a date. It is more like “deferred until I un-defer it” or “stop looking at me with your shiny blank checkbox…right now!”
Start Dates
Right now, these things are going in the drawer. Items that make it into the main Action table must prove that they are essential for Action, the centerpiece of Actiontastic, before they are granted a sliver of the main attention zone in the app. Items with start dates before today can be displayed or hidden via a filter, and there is no reason to keep looking at them once the Action is in play.
Due Dates
These are probably going to make it into the main Action table as it is important to know what absolutely must be completed today. However, I don’t see any logical way to sort items by these dates, nor does it seem to mesh with GTD or even a clear view of urgent vs. important. It is quite possible to have an Action with no due date executed prior to an Action that is due today. There may be no due date for calling an old friend over lunch and this will likely be executed before “call boss re: cover on TPS report” due at 5:00 PM today. (As many of you already know, Actiontastic allows drag reordering of actions in projects. This ordering defines the order in the Context view as well as what appears when the “Next Action” filter is selected.)
Thoughts?
So what do you think? Crazy? Good? Both? I want to keep this app super clean and super simple so sticking to a minimal set of features is important. The Action must stay at the center of focus. Dates seem to be important enough to warrant attention, but let me know if you think otherwise.
