ThinkingRock Forum

I was reading about Chandler (a whole PIM/mail productivity suite), and they said something I liked - most tasks don't really end, they just spawn more tasks. This is like in software estimation, it usually doesn't make must sense to say "I'm 90% percent done", but it makes more sense to say "before a release, I must still do X,Y Z".

In the context of TR, I have to options to remove a task from my focus. I either delete it (a loss of information that I very rarely want - only if it was a duplicate anyway), or I mark it as done. But often, when I sit to do a task, I actually think of 5 different things I should do related to this task, which I put in the notes. Maybe GTD would say they should have gone into tasks, but I'm not sure because the context is useful. What would be nice is to be able to select one of those tasks, right click and get an option to immediately convert it into a task, maybe inheriting the context+topic from the old action. In fact, I envision using 3 different logical actions (though maybe its only worth implementing one or two):
1. Convert this text into an inactive action in the same project/level.
2. Convert the current action into a project, and convert this text into an action in it.
3. The old action is done, but has spawned some related work: convert the selected text into a new action, maybe somehow connected to the old action, which is now marked as done, and is useful only as context.

As a preamble to my answer let me state the following: In my system I number each project with a serial number. This enables me to remember my most active projects by that number rather than try and search through a long list of projects to find the one I want. I also use sub projects quite frequently. These are numbered like, 010.1, 010.2 etc, for project number 010. In effect I try and have a structure in my project list, so as to enable me to easily access them, especially when I'm looking at them on the PC monitor.

What I would do for the case that you mention would be to create an inactive action in the project concerned instead of entering the task as a note. An inactive action would be naturally linked to the project (this probably tackles your third option), or you could convert it to a project (this maybe deals with your second option).

Of course I could do these things manually, in fact I do quite a lot. This is what causes me to think that the software should support this use case, and it would definitely be faster to have semi-automated ways to perform these continuations.

Daniel