gtg-contributors team mailing list archive

[Bryce Harrington <bryce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 02:27:56AM +0200, Luca Invernizzi wrote:
> To sum up, couldn't we do project as a special type of tag, that also
> appears as a root node in the task view?

I think you're right.  For the most part, for tracking purposes *inside
gtg*, the notion of 'project' is quite simple and could be implemented
as a special kind of tag or task.

Currently, I do projects by creating a task to serve as the "root", so
that I can keep notes in it and give it start/due dates.  Then I also
create a tag with a similar name, so that I can more easily collect
tasks related to that project.

However, it gets messy.  If I make subtasks off the root task, then it
becomes harder to find the root project task since I have to turn off
WorkView, wait for gtg to regenerate the entire task list for my 713
tasks, and then go hunting for the task so I can review and update the
project notes.

So something such as you describe, where a 'project' is like midway
between a tag and a task, would help a LOT and would make irrelevant
much of the usability problems.

> Can you think of some use of projects that would not be possible with
> this implementation?

A couple things, but I think they could be solved.

First, when I plan out a project, I like to quickly brainstorm out a
bunch of tasks and jot them down.  For this, I'm often editing heavily,
renaming the tasks and so forth.  Since I can edit multiple task titles
in the taskeditor, I usually do it there.

However there are various bugs that make this cumbersome, like how if
you backspace the first letter of a task title it breaks the arrow at
the start of the line.  Etc. etc. we have open bugs for all the
problems.  Also, I find the performance is slow when editing task titles
from within the taskeditor, so what I usually do is write all the tasks
as plain text (using " * my task" instead of " - my task"), and then
change them into tasks later when I feel like my editing is done.


Second, many times when I'm planning out a project, I don't actually
want the tasks to show up in my todo list yet.  Maybe I need to wait for
approval before starting on the project, or maybe I need to do research
or complete another project first.

The workarounds I've used so far is to either set the start dates
forward a long time (this is easy selecting all the tasks and using the
context menu to set the start date), or to create a "gating task" like
"Start Project Foo" and making that a child of all the project's tasks,
so that those tasks don't show up until I mark that gating task Done.
Obviously neither of these workarounds are very discoverable and are
kind of cumbersome.  There are one or two bug reports in the tracker
that could help, like being able to have tags be state 'inactive' or
something.

Bryce