Desktop app has panel “Contexts” on the left. When user selects a context there, Everdo shows tasks in this context nicely grouped by their state (Next, Someday)… But note: it doesn’t show non-first next tasks from sequential projects, even if these tasks belong to the context. It’s perfectly ok to me: in my opinion, the whole point of sequential projects is to hide tasks from view until their time would come.
There’s also “Tags” panel on the left. When user selects a context (or contact, or area) there, Everdo again shows tasks with this tag nicely grouped by their state (Next, Someday)… But now, in the “Next” section, Everdo shows all next tasks with the tag, including non-first next tasks from sequential projects. It’s perfectly OK to my opinion, too: i can see usefulness in the ability to review everything with a tag.
But i can’t find a way to see all tasks for a contact, excluding non-first next tasks from sequential projects. Is there any way to do it? Maybe i’m missing a filter somewhere? Or maybe it’s possible to implement “contacts” panel on the left like existing “contexts” panel, that would provide desired behaviour? Or maybe i’m completely missing the point – i’m new to Everdo, so everything’s possible.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for long description, hope i managed to make it clear. Thanks!
Hi Dmitry, you’ve described the current behavior correctly.
There’s no special way to view all tasks for a contact, excluding the non-first next tasks. What is your use case for this?
To give a bit of context on why context vs tag navigation options were originally implemented to have different filtering behavior
When selecting a context list, you want to see actionable tasks that match the context.
When selecting a tag, it’s more like search - you want to see everything that matches. This mode supports contexts as well because they are tags as well.
Thanks for you description of rationales behind current context and tag navigation options, they are now clear to me and i agree that they are important and useful.
However, my case is as follows. Imagine i have the project “Setup point of presence in new datacenter”. It is sequential and has following tasks:
Work out new PoP budget with CFO. Context: @office, contact: CFO
I have also other tasks associated with contact “DevOps manager” - e.g. “waiting for: get and read reliability report for march”, "discuss migration to PostgreSQL @office” etc. I need some screen where i can see all tasks related to DevOps manager so i can check each task when we meet in office. I don’t want see “Setup point of presence in new datacenter – Arrange hardware setup” in this screen until first two tasks in “Setup point of presence in new datacenter” are complete, because time of this task didn’t come yet. BUT in my opinion it’s nice to be able to associate task “Arrange hardware setup” with DevOps manager during initial planning of the project.
In short, my use case is: view tasks that could be discussed with a contact immediately. For this purpose, non-first next actions in sequential projects are “blocked” by preceding next actions, and can’t be discussed with contact until all preceding tasks are done.
May be best solution for me is to represent DevOps manager as a context, not as a contact. As i see, only thing that can be done with a contact that can’t be done with a context is the assignment to “waiting for:” field of a task, and i tend not to use that feature much anyway. I tend to represent “waiting” state as an “ask about…” task, either as next action (“ask about it next time you’re talking”) or scheduled action (“ask about it after…”)
Any ideas about my use case would be greatly appreciated.