I recently started using GTD again, and was wondering if it’s possible to make a project or task to “Wait” (to depend on) for some other task or project?
Just nesting tasks inside one project won’t work for me - these are naturally different and only true dependency mechanic might help.
Are there any near or mid-term plans to implement this?
And a second more specific ask: can you implement a second “Wait”-alike function named “Wait-and-stop”? Sometimes it makes sense to wait for some task in project and NOT proceed with the next one until previous is done. Now after setting a task to “Wait” state I see a next task from the same project (set to be sequential) in the “Next” folder which is not how I want it to really be
You are right. I thought about this problem for a while and I think it can only be properly solved by supporting a tree-like project structure. It would be awesome of course to have this ability built-in. But I’m realizing it’s both very complicated technically (especially given the existing design) and also unnecessary most of the time. This makes the feature a poor target to apply effort to, at least at present time.
So for now the decision is to leave complex project planning out of the scope of a GTD tool and only support simple next actions. There’s also workarounds like:
using tags to block out non-actionable items
not creating blocked items in the first place
moving to someday
This I think is more important and actionable. It happens all the time that the whole sequential project is blocked by just one Waiting item, and the app doesn’t handle this. I’m going to add this to the backlog.
I’m thinking about being able to assign some tags special “powers” like being able to block a project and so on. So you would add such tag to a Waiting item and prevent the project actions from appearing in Next.
