How do you handle this situation?

Jerud

I’m getting pretty comfortable with the latest iteration of my “system” in Legend, but there’s one thing it doesn’t do very well: Unexpectedly prolonged simple tasks. These are things that “should have” been quick to-dos but hit a snag. I call them “nags”.

It usually starts with a simple task like this:
[ ] Call <company> to resolve <issue> !<date>

I call, and get some kind of runaround. Issue not fixed…“give it a couple days and check again please, sir” 🙄

So: I want to mark that I DID this thing (so satisfying), but I also need to schedule my next call to “nag” them in a few days. And these things can go on for quite some time…I have one now that’s four months old; I’ve called a dozen times.

I’ve tried a few methods, but they all bug me somehow or another. Currently I’m bumping the date but ‘logging’ each call within the Notes. This works in almost every way but deprives me of that “complete” satisfaction.

I’m interested to hear how y’all are dealing with similar situations. So I can steal them. 😈

Jorge

Jerud Well you just described my nearly every day, requesting people to do apparently simple things, but having them hit all kind of bumps.

This is what I do. I start with the simple task in the very same way you do. When the date comes and it seems immediately evident that the damn thing will take unnecessarily longer and have to jump to multiple hoops (typical in corporate environments) what I do is I simply select the <Issue> description, cut it an paste it in the same line before the [] and then press enter and tab.
This effectively creates an issue I need to track, and makes the task I did accomplish a little task that I can mark as done when I did it ( and get my little pat in the back). Then I subsequently add the next step and date to follow up, complete the call I did make and move on.

Well I also go up to the <Issue> description and add my infamous categories #statuswaiting and #catproblemstosolve, before moving on.

This has the advantage of keeping the creation date of the issue right when the first activity was identified and being able to track all subsequent tasks that will need to happen to resolve the darn thing.

Jerud

Jorge When I tried to follow your steps in an Outline pane, I ended up with a parent-task and a child-task. I guess you complete the child-task and then revise the date on the parent? That makes sense to me. Unfortunately when I do it in an Agenda Pane (where I really need it), I get a little mess. After the paste, I have:

Then after the enter, tab, I get:

(I had to abandon the <issue> notation because apparently Legend apparently interprets <> as HTML when pasted and they simply don’t appear.)
So I guess that’s two more bugs… 🙄

Jorge

Jerud I guess you complete the child-task and then revise the date on the parent?

Yeah but I just copy the <issue> part and no the due date, I let the due date fall down to the sub task that I will complete.

Jerud Unfortunately when I do it in an Agenda Pane (where I really need it

You are right there is a bug there… I actually had never used this in an agenda pane so first time I’ve seen it. I guess I have always done this in outline mode. I’ll raise the bug but it doesn’t reproduce in the same way you described. Here is what I see in my environment: https://forum.legendapp.com/d/623-hitting-enter-in-the-middle-of-an-item-in-agenda-mode-has-incorrect-behavior

The cutting and pasting of the <issue> part works perfeclty for me because I never copye the date, I always let the date go down to the subtask. When you include the date and the end of string for the item in the copy then yes you have the error you describe which is messy, but that’s a separate bug as you said.

LauraH

Obviously this is highly dependent on the details of your individual system. But I also encounter this kind of thing a lot.
Here’s the basic’s of my board setup and workflow relevant to this discussion:

My “Daily Dashboard” view is three panes: 1). simple outline zoomed to my “active projects” node. 2) active projects filtered to show only tasks. 3) a “daily journal” pane (kind of bullet journal style) for notes, etc.
Part of my “daily setup” workflow is to check my agenda and add a high priority to anything “today”, so those stand out on my #2 pane.

My flow when the “simple task” becomes not a single task:

When this first happens, the item becomes a “project” instead of a simple task (GTD Style) - so I create a new project for it, and put the (previously simple) task into that project. I’ll frequently add notes to that individual task - the date I called, the person I talked to, what I was told at that point… etc. Then mark the task completed.
Create a new task (now within the project) something like, “Follow up with Bob RE XYZ (call #2) !date”

Which of course, does not help you for doing something from the Agenda pane. 😛. But that’s been my solution.

wecanseeformiles

@Jerud when a simple task gets complicated could you turn it a repeating task, so that you get the satisfaction of ticking it off while knowing it will come up again when it needs to? You can then log the details of each interaction into the notes of this repeating task. Once it’s finally done you can close it for good by ending the repeating schedule.

The only flaw in my suggestion is that Legend doesn’t record all the ‘completions’ of a repeating item.

Jerud

wecanseeformiles I like this, it’s similar to what I’m doing now except I’m just manually scheduling the next ‘nag’ rather than making it a repeater. That’d be the right call when it’s a daily nag, although I often have nags that are based on a specific date, not an interval. So I would still reschedule those manually.

It would be ideal if repeaters stored a ‘history’ of each completed instance. Although the workaround of logging each followup in the Notes of a single item actually reads easier than a string of items each with their own Notes, keeping a more robust history is still preferred as it’s more versatile and complete. For example, having an actual completed-item history of repeating events lets the user include emails, images, or other attachments to those items.

aren’t always on a regular interval.