This may be a matter of opinion, but current behavior is not as I expected, and more than that – it’s just not very useful.
In a group-by-project Pane, user can choose to sort the Projects by “modified date” either ascending or descending. BUT, the “modified date” for each Project – which is just a parent-item only updates when changes are made directly to the parent item itself. So the only thing that’s going to change the display order of Projects in that Pane, is if I edit the text of the Projects. I don’t know about most of you, but my Project names don’t tend to change often. This sorting option therefore has no value to me.
What WOULD have value is if the parents re-arranged themselves based upon changes in their children. That way I could send more-active Projects to the top (or bottom) of the Pane in order to help distribute my attention across a variety of subjects. Otherwise I tend to work on the “fun” projects and ignore the mundane ones : )
I see two possible approaches that seem like they would work:
- Update parent-item ‘modified’ dates to = the newest ‘modified’ date of any of its descendants (children, grands, great-grands, etc.) – ONLY if that parent is a Project. This would be yet another ‘superpower’ of Projects.
- Don’t change anything in the Outline itself, but write this behavior into the definition of Group-By-Project panes. Projects get ordered based on the modified-date of their most-recently-modified descendant, rather than the ‘modified’ date of the Project itself.
