Hi,
I’d like to show actions from more than one area at a time
I’m repsonsible for several areas.
Example:
I have following areas
work-finances
work-maintenance
work-strategy
work-opps
work-leads
Now I’d like to show all actions belowing to work-opps and work-leads but not other work related actions.
What do you guys think about this feature request?
Definitely very useful functionality.
I am in very similar situation at work.
Am I right in understanding that basically what you want is to be able to filter by multiple tags as an OR operation?
Right now selecting more than one tag filters like an AND && operation.
If I select the PIZZA tag I will get all pizzas but if I select PIZZA and ONIONS I only get Pizzas with onions which means other foods with onions will be eliminated
You would like the ability to change it to PIZZA or ONIONS giving you all the pizzas OR all the foods with onions,
right?
this would mean that would need the current way the tags work as && (AND) operations to be changed to work like || (OR) operations. But if I had to choose between the two , I would of course prefer the way that tags currently work.
yes a toggle could be provided to toggle AND or OR but that would add sooooo much complexity / barrier of entry into the UI which honestly is already slightly high.
if you are grouping work-opps and work-leads often enough to consistently want to see them together, I suggest that there is a good reason you need to see them together and they might deserve a tag for that group.
Ex. Opportunities and leads have to do with future so label them future. Select that tag and now you have all of them together.
The way that tags work now, I also recommend that you label all of these with the WORK tag and then make separate tags for finance maintenance and strategy etc.
You can then select WORK and see all of them together and then further filter down by selecting FINANCE.
I though about selecting multiple areas of focus not tags.
I think the ability to select multiple areas contradicts the purpose of the Area concept.
An Area as a subset of actions which are to be reviewed and worked on separately from any other action not not belonging to the same Area.
By this definition, If you feel the need to work on actions from separate areas at the same time, this can be an indication that the areas should be one. You can still differentiate various kinds of work using other types of tags - labels, contexts.
I think the ability to select multiple areas contradicts the purpose of the Area concept.
I disagree. 
the GTD concept describes AoF or AoR as a way to connect your projects to goals and other higher horizons. GTD in general does not make hard requirements how you use the data you have available. DA in fact often emphasizes that GTD is personal in many ways.
this can be an indication that the areas should be one.
IMHO quite the opposite is true:
If I do it this way I’d end ob with two areas: “work” and “personal” , which in fact is what “contradicts the purpose of the Area concept”
A more simple example:
Let’s say I have 4 personal areas and 6 work areas and 3 community related areas.
At the moment it’s not possible to just show personal or work related stuff.
I’d would habe to use just 3 areas or add several additional labels which would make data maintenance even more costly.
if you are grouping work-opps and work-leads often enough to consistently want to see them together, I suggest that there is a good reason you need to see them together and they might deserve a tag for that group.
I want to keep data -hugging (maintaining parameters of actions) at a minimum. For me personally the effort I put in to tagging and labeling actions never paid off!
Also, I do not know what grouping might make sense in the future, so I’d like to use the information I already put in to the system and then I want to slice and dice as needed.
Regarding filtering contexts:
When filtering by context, a logic AND is perfect because you want to filter the available options down to the few actions that can be done best at a given moment.
The logical OR does only make sense with areas.
I know that there are lot’s of things that won’t help everdo being a good list manager for GTD.
But a strong and flexibel filtering system definitely will support everdo in being that.
OT: I bought everdo because I love what I see and want to support the development. Currently I’m still using Nirvana but every time something annoys me in Nirvana I check in with everdo and I already see a lot of things that are solved in a better way.
So keep up the good work Andrei!!!
I see. Just make Areas work as OR operator?
I was thinking that having tags work as AND operator and then having @contexts work as OR might be an interesting idea, but…
Being able to select more than one area is an interesting idea.
Personally I am fine with how things work because I just have the following Areas
Work
Life
Routines
Reminders
Then within Work I use tags efficiently to narrow down what I need to see. I don’t see what is stopping you from doing that.
It’s really not so much effort. Most tasks are just duplicates of other tasks. So you make one task and then just duplicate it.
I think that batch editing would really help though.
That looks really hard to manage. I recommend a Work area and then Finance, Maintenance, stragegy, opps, leads tags.
Hm, I played around a bit, but couldn’t find a way to show several areas inside work.
I tried to combine Areas and Labels. Could you please elaborate a bit more how you would do this?
That looks really hard to manage. I recommend a Work area and then Finance, Maintenance, stragegy, opps, leads tags.
I’m running my own business, so I don’t have to run all this areas all by myself but I’m responsible for those areas and I have goals and a lot of delegated projects.
Good points. I need to think more about this.
An important question I have is this.
What value do you derive from defining areas in the way you mentioned?
I suspect it’s because you are using the GTD definition of Area as “Area of responsibility”, which is perfectly fine. What I’m wondering is whether right now it gives you any benefit within the app versus defining in-app areas in a way that works well with global filtering. For example combining the labels on which you frequenlty work in parallel.
If my business partner comes in and just wants to get an overview of what is going on in sales I’d would just look at leads and opps.
And of course I can just clean up one area (kind of a weekly review) if I need re-group my sales activities.
IMHO:
The areas work and personal are not what DA meant when he talked about AoR/AoFs.
Work and Personal are more like subsystems in the system but nothing like an area in the origin sense of GTD.
On the other hand tagging every action and project with a work or personal label would not and never did work for me either.
Because when the fire storm is on I just can not keep the tagging discipline up and running that I defined and committed to when I was on my last caffeine pushed “oh-this-is-so-exciting-if-I-input-22-parameters-as-tags-I-could-filter-exactly-what-I-could-do-on-a-Saturday-in-my-closet-at-home-with-34-seconds-left-before-leaving-to-the-wedding-of-my-best-friend” GTD trip.
Tagging other than context and area never did work for me. Occasionally I estimate the needed time, but that’s it.
Basically I’m inferring that the tagging function is the answer but the fact that it is too time consuming to manage is it’s bad point.
The thing that would really answer the issue is having batch editing for tags.
The reason tagging is strenuous is because there are currently LIMITED batch function in Everdo.
You can set global tags and then every created task will inherit those tags but I have almost always forgotten to set the globals before making the task and then had to set each one manually.
SUCH A PAIN!!!
From my experience in programming basics, I understand that for Andrei to implement batch editing for tags it would take months of full time work on this project. Not only that but that is for each app WEB, Windows, Mac, Linux ,Android and iOS.
Basically any big feature he wants to add now he has to think about, " shiznit! If I implement this then I will have to update this feature across FIVE different platforms.
Currently he is working on getting iOS up to the Android app.
I fear that batch editing will never happen in my lifetime T_T
If you do implement batch editing features TAKE A LESSON from the Swipes App failure!
batch editing need to work like
sudo chmod +X
on linux.
the tags need to be added on or subtracted. Swipes app tried to do batch editing that you select a whole bunch of tasks and then select a bunch of tags and when you press save , everything takes that setup and it was a nightmare!!! DO NOT DO THAT!
or
this is the only way that it will work!
Lets ignore the definitions of AoR / Area for the moment. I need to better understand the specific issues that arise from the current design.
What if you keep your current tagging approach, but perform filtering via the filter section where more flexible filtering is possible?
For example, you have the Work area (it’s easy to maintain it by just creating all your projects while “Work” is selected). There’s no reason to use, say, “work-ops” as the global filter as long as it doesn’t work in a way that’s helpful.
When you are at Work and you want to do something from “work-opps” or “work-leads”, you go to Next and negate irrelevant tags (finances, strategy, etc).
What do you think? Do you see reasons why this wouldn’t work?
Sorry if you have already answered that, but I missed it.
This absolutely makes sense. Add / Remove / remove all operations are a good and easy way to go when it comes to batch editing of sets of tags.
I will do some evaluation of your suggestion.
I tried it now and it took a while until I found out how “negate” works.
At least I can get what I want, although I have to admit that I don’t like the way, but it’s okay for the moment.
Please share your thoughts here once you’ve had some time with this approach. This is how the app was designed to be used, so hopefully it can be adapted for you with minor tweaks or improvements.
I have changed my position. I now completely agree with Manu.
I just ran into a problem today where I want to show all areas except one or two of them and am forced to show all or only one and had to keep toggling back and forth. It is not a huge deal but I’m now on holiday so I want to see my home life and work stuff together. Usually I don’t have this need and it would not have come up unless I’d been on holiday and realized that there was no quick way to do it.
So I think just like Manu, It would be great if we could have OR || operations on Areas.
I love how tags are AND operations but it would be great if Areas worked as ORs.
I just discovered “negate” as well. RIght click with mouse.
It’s a cool feature.
OR operations in AREAS would be great too.
Thanks Andrei
Hi
On mobile long press on a tag to negate a tag. And you can negate multiple tags 
Just figured it out.
Long press the tag to negate it. AWESOME FEATURE Andrei.
I just figured out that you can actually add tasks to more than one area.
I would just add those tasks to both areas. Problem solved.