ThinkingRock Forum

I'm new to GTD (just finished reading the book), so maybe this is an issue with my understanding of its implementation...

So, I've collected my thoughts and processed them and now I'm left with a whole heap of things to do ASAP. Fine. The problem is that a lot of my Next Actions are dependent on another Next Action being completed. There is no point doing them if something else hasn't been done.

For example, I want to organise going out for dinner for my birthday later in the week, so the steps for the project might be something like:
- Look for a venue
- Make a list of people to invite
- Contact friends
- Make reservation
- Attend

I want to record all these actions in Thinking Rock, so I've made them all Next Actions (ASAP) in a "Birthday" project. But now when I go to review my ASAP actions there are heaps of Next Actions that I can't actually do at the moment because they have a dependency that needs to be completed first. All these tasks (such as "make reservation") are cluttering up the view, when all I really want to see is "Look for a venue".

So my question is, should there be a way of selecting a dependent Action for each Next Action? So that when a Next Action is completed, any Next Actions that are dependent on it become ASAP Next Actions. For example, once I complete "Look for a venue" then "Make reservation" becomes an ASAP Next Action.

Maybe the problem is that I shouldn't be making all these tasks ASAP Next Actions. But if so, where should I put them? If I make them a future action, I can't group them in a project. I can't make them a scheduled action, because I don't know when the action they are dependent on will be finished. Where should I capture these tasks?

Sorry if this is a stupid question!

BTW, I think ThinkingRock shows great potential. Is there a way we can be notified of new versions?

Hi Andy

You can set an action to be inactive and it will not show up in the Do ASAP list. So you can put your actions in the order you need to do them and set the dependent ones to inactive.

There is no way at present to define a dependent action so that when the action depended on is done it is automatically set to active.
However, when a project does not have at least one active action its icon changes to red so that you can easily see that you need to make one active or set it to done.

We have thought about this feature but decided to keep it simple initially.

We are planning the next release in mid-August.
We will probably set up an email list or something to notify interested people. We will post a message on this forum and put it in the News page.

Jeremy

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ThinkingRock Developer

That sounds reasonable. Simple is good.

Thanks Jeremy.

I think NA dependencies are great in principle, but might be complicated to actually implement.

For each dependent action, would you want to set a standard due date window (3 days after last action completed, etc.), or set manually for each action? Are actions dependent strictly based on the order in the projects view, or do you select the 'upstream' and 'downstream' actions manually?

1 way might be to have a checkbox to make an action dependent, and by default make it active after the item immediately above it is completed, with a default due date (say 3 days or some user-defined setting.) If the user needs to change anything, they can do it. But hopefully in most cases they can just leave it as is.

But if there's not a relatively elegant solution, then it's probably not worth trying to implement.

How about, the topmost NA in a project needs to be done before all the others? Then, you can have a birthday project:

Birthday:
- Look for a venue
- Make a list of people to invite
- Contact friends
- Make reservation
- Attend

The Subitems would perhaps be grayed out and have a different icon? Maybe an arrow? Or make them inactive? They should not be displayed on the global NA screen...because you can't do them!

Then, when you check of the action, the next one (in order) become "active", and shows up in the NA screen.

What if you have several independent parts of a project? Put the actions into subprojects! The difficult bit is thinking of a name for the subproject, but even that is not necessary. TR will let you create a project without a name.

Project
- Indpendent action, complete anytime
- Subproject
- Next dependant action
- Action dependent on above

etc, etc

Any drawbacks to this scheme? Seems elegant to me...

Your suggestion would work. However, if one typically creates non-dependent tasks, then creating subprojects for each task would seem to be a lot of extra work.

I think it would work fine as simply a checkbox per task to have a task be dependent on the task immediately above it.

Even then it wouldn't be perfect, since not everything is going to be sequential. You might complete 1 task that allows you to do 2 subsequent tasks, etc...

Another option would be at the project level- a checkbox to make all tasks within the project dependent. But that is even more simplified than having a dependency option at the task level.

I don't think this one is much fun for the devs to tackle- there will be complaints or issues no matter what!

Hi, I am new to GTD and TR, too (and German, so I hope my posts will be, if not correct English, at least understandable), but I missed the "dependent actions" possibility, too.

I find the suggestion of Jeremy helpful for the moment: When there are no ASAPs left in a project, it will change into red, and as I will know the project is not done completely this will be the remainder to define the NOW next action. I think I will put the (probable) sequence of actions either in the "organizing" box of the project or define "inactive actions", as Jeremy said. Only problem: GTD is supposed to be very flexible, and how often will the nature of the next action change on account of the outcome of the previous one?

The solution I would suggest would be a checkbox for an action: "ask me to define next action if this one is done" and some kind of alert or automatic entry in "collecting thoughts" or something like this when I mark that action as "done".

What do you think of it?
Miriam

As a GTD idea:

Mark everything else in that Project (that is dependent) as "inactive". You'll take the second as you mark them off...and then as you mark item A "done", then you'll end up making the next one active.

It's two steps (vs. the one invisible one you want.)