It’s unintuitive to me that assigning a parent project to an inbox item automatically moves it to Next Actions.
I guess in Everdo there’s no concept of a project having inbox items. I suppose there’s a logic to that, but let me explain my workflow.
Often when adding items to my inbox I will give them some info even if I’m not ready to full process the item yet - like tags and due dates. Sometimes I already know the project it belongs to so I want to assign it right away, even if I’m not ready to decide on all the other details yet. But if I do that, suddenly the inbox item is missing (it’s gone into Next Actions).
In my view, I should have to explicitly indicate that an item should be moved somewhere else (Next, Someday, Waiting, Scheduled). It seems that assigning a project is the only time when an item decides to automatically move from Inbox to Next Actions.
Another aspect of why this would be nice: when processing the inbox, sometimes I filter by tags so I can focus on one context at a time. It would be helpful if I could also filter or group by Project so that, again, I can focus on one context at a time rather than jumping all around. Maybe this is more relevant to me specifically because I tend to have fewer but bigger projects.
The assumption is that you capture first, process second.
So you add things to inbox without thinking too much about them. You are doing something else and just want to get an idea out of your head.
Then at some later point you go over the list and fully specify each item so that it become actionable / deferred / trash. With this workflow there is no partial processing where you work on the item a little while it’s in Inbox, then leave it alone to pick it up later.
Do you feel like your partial processing workflow is beneficial for your kinds of projects or is it more like a habit?
In my mind it’s less about “partially processing” it and more about capturing the info that’s immediately on my mind along with the necessary context.
I guess I misspoke about adding time/energy to inbox tasks when adding to the inbox; I don’t often do that. But I definitely add tags (like labels and contacts) for extra context.
If I’m thinking about a specific project and I realize there’s something I need to do for it, I want to immediately capture that thought and plop it into my inbox, including the fact of what project it’s associated with. That way it’s easier to process the inbox later.
Right now I usually put the project in the inbox item title. For example lets say I create an inbox item like “Develop dark mode feature for ProjectX”. Ideally I could just quick capture it like “Develop dark mode feature :pp ProjectX”. Well there’s no :pp inline command for adding a parent/project, but ideally there would be! Anyway, I can capture that context in the title yes but it’s more work later when I need to both fix the title and also assign the item to the project through the GUI.
Thanks for clarifying. It does make more sense this way. I’m not sure what would happen if the app allowed items to sit in Inbox with a project assigned. I’ll look into this, but can’t promise anything.
How do you capture this item? Is it via the global shortcut or i in the app?
I actually tried disabling the forced Next transition in the editor and found it annoying that now you’d have to move every item to Next manually in addition to assigning a project.
So maybe this can be workflow-dependent. I think if there was a way to specify a project in Quick Capture, then this absolutely should not move the task to Next. But when you edit an existing one in Inbox, then I think it should move it to Next unless you manually set another status.
I use both ways. But if I’m actually trying to assign the project, then yeah I’m in the actual app using i right now. I see what you mean about it being annoying to select project and also move to Next. I agree it might make sense based on context:
When adding to inbox (if there was an inline command) → Stay in inbox
When adding to inbox (if there was an inline command) → Stay in inbox
When processing inbox → Add to next
I could give this a try but I still think it’s something to keep behind a setting to avoid breaking the existing behavior for users who might depend on it.