Ideas for marking "Someday" Items?

LauraH

I’ve used the “Things3” app for awhile - and while there’s much to love, I found it to limiting for me (hence back to Legend!).

However, one feature I really miss from Things3 is the ability have to mark items as “someday” (vs “active”). Active items (and their associated tasks) show in lists, etc.
“Someday” items stay within the structure of the app (so you don’t have to move them to a special section), but they sort to the bottom of lists, slightly greyed out to indicate they are not “active”. And they don’t show when looking at lists of “anytime” or “Today” tasks. Part of the great strength of this is the ability to see EVERYTHING on your lists, but also easily visually see what has been chosen for active, vs “not now.”

I’ve been pondering how to create a similar system in Legend and I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas?

I’d rather not use a tag - as that’s a little tedious to add or remove, and it doesn’t give a strong visual indicator of where a task falls. I’d welcome any ideas or input!

Currently:
I already use repeating tasks a lot, but in order to make this work well I also have to filter nearly any view I look at. (I use: date:today or date:overdue or date:none as a filter on almost everything!). This approximates the “active” view for DATED tasks (ie - not showing anything that isn’t ready to be done now.) It is kind of tedious to need to make sure everything has a filter, but I’ve accepted that is the tradeoff for Legend’s flexibility.
I’m trying to figure out how to do something similar for other projects/tasks that do not have dates.

andrew

I use priority. Anything without a priority is “someday” and I manually put at the bottom (guess you could sort by priority).

For some items that are someday, I put a date well into the future so that it surfaces for reconsideration at an appropriate time. Using different future dates allows item-specific someday-ness.

Jerud

Hard to say without knowing your workflow, but some half-ideas in case that helps…

The closest you’re gonna get to sorting these items to the bottom of a dated list like Things3 is by customizing Agenda Panes in Settings to sort #someday to the bottom.

To speed up application of the tag you can make it be something arbitrary like #~, which would also sort to the bottom of GB-Tags panes as a bonus. There aren’t many characters that sort after “z”.
For quickly applying the tag, you might add a text expander utility to your computer – a good productivity hack anyway – so you can apply that tag with a quick keystroke. I like Espanso but there are many. Yet another rabbit hole…!

Or use an advanced filter that includes these items along with your dated items in spite of being undated. You’ll need to identify them somehow though, such as applying “star”:
has:date OR (-has:date AND has:star)

You could then flatten that pane and sort on date…if you’re brave. I have found that sorting on date outside of Agenda Panes can get sketchy. YMMV
You should also be able to use a GB-date pane if you don’t want it formatted as Agenda. The last group would be “no date” and these items (and only these items) would appear there, which is exactly what you wanted…but don’t try unless you’re ready to throw things and cry. I’ve never been able to coax reliable (or even comprehensible) behavior out of GB-date panetypes. 😭

If you don’t want to give up stars for other uses, I suggest looking at the “highlight” formatting option. It can be applied with a hotkey, filtered using is:highlighted and visually controlled with the theme tools. If you want these items to look identical to regular items but just faded, use:
Display Settings –> Colors

.highlight {
background-color: #00000000;
color: #(pick-something-lighter-than-normal);
}

(note that is -eight- zeroes for the bg color; the first 6 actually don’t matter because “00” makes it fully transparent)
(or, you can probably just delete the background-color line)

Display Settings –> Layout

.highlight {
}

(that is, erase everything that’s normally there)

Similarly, you could have that filter act on markdown formatting, such as having it find ** which would act on items that contain bolded text. I have not tested this one, may get weird. It could really be any text that’s suitably unique…

LauraH

@andrew and @Jerud - THANK YOU for sharing your thoughts and hacks!
Jerud - that’s a ton of detail ideas - THANK YOU!

Reading through the ideas was helpful… if for the primary reason that it reinforced the idea in my mind that for my work style, I need something as visual and maintenance free as possible. If I forget to apply a tag or star; and something gets sorted wrong because pane behavior is wonky… And it get’s lost… that’s not ideal!
Jerud - I agree that a lot of the pane views are still kind of unpredictable. 🙁

What I settled on for now is creating two outline sections for each of my major project areas (ie - Household, Yard.Garden, Self) much like the areas I had set up in Things3. One section is “active” the other is “Someday”. Then create boards for each area that have one pane pointed to “active” and the other for “someday”. On that board, I can easily move items from one to the other.

Highly visual, and allows me to zoom into just the “active” part of my outline for getting task lists, etc. It was the board piece I was missing there. Trying to do it all in just the sorting just wasn’t working for me, but grouping it under the outline, and setting up boards to visualize it seems to be working well for now.

Thank you fo taking the time to share ideas everyone!

Jerud

LauraH glad you found a solution! With most apps the problem is not having enough options; with Legend it’s having too many! I also like visual/spatial solutions; most of my “workflows” involve promoting items from one pane to another by drag/drop.

Thanks for sharing your journey here, and reminding us all to value simplicity. Some problems are best solved with Legend’s features (e.g. tags, stars, priorities, formatting) but quite a few are better addressed via document structure, as you did.

For such a long time I kept “work” and “personal” in separate documents, before finally realizing I just needed one document split into two top-level ‘buckets’ (work, personal). I felt really dumb afterwards but hey…. I got there! It initially seemed weird for my biggest doc to contain two plain items at the root and everything else is within them – but it was the key!

LauraH

Jerud Heh, that’s much where I arrived too. I need all my stuff in ONE DOCUMENT, but separate by outline levels so I can zoom in if I need to limit the scope. HOWEVER - it makes it so much easier to check just ONE calendar to see all the “stuff” coming up and assure myself I didn’t miss something because I didn’t check all the documents.
🙂

SamMarrocco

Like Jerud, I also kept Work and Personal in two separate documents until I came to the same conclusion and moved to a single document with two top-level ‘buckets’. And, like Laura, I discovered than it also helped keep me from searching in a document, not finding something, and realizing I had not searched ALL documents.

Thanks for those suggestions about the Agenda pane Jerud. I’ll have to explore using that for prioritizing items as well. Highlights are also nice for this but I’m still longing for full color support of text. It would help visually organize things a big more at a glance.