After, what, 15 years? of using these, one thing that has always bothered me is that there is too little tying next_actions entries to Projects/. It's too easy, as a result, to end up just using next_actions.otl as a todo list and not updating Projects.
So I'd like to improve that a bit. But I don't want to have the files end up less human-readable and editable.
A few steps which might together help:
- Every project which is created gets a unique-id, either an incrementing integer or a uuid or even just the creation date or a hash of concatenation of title and creation date.
- When editing ~/gtd/Projects/Generator-slideout/actions.otl, some action (";n") will open ~/gtd/next_actions.otl and create a new entry with the heading "unique-id: project-title: date". The user is expected to type in an action, of course. I had thought that the current line or block from actions.otl could get copied over, but I'm not sure whether that would be more of a pain. Maybe make that optional (;n versus ;c?)
- Hitting ";d" (done) while on an item in next_actions, the current action block gets moved to the top of the gtd/done.otl file, and also copied to the ~/Projects/Generator-slideout/log.otl.
Maybe the unique-id isn't needed and just using the project directory name suffices. I know I've had same-named files under multiple ~/gtd/Completed/20??/ directories, but maybe that doesn't matter at all.
After, what, 15 years? of using these, one thing that has always bothered me is that there is too little tying next_actions entries to Projects/. It's too easy, as a result, to end up just using next_actions.otl as a todo list and not updating Projects.
So I'd like to improve that a bit. But I don't want to have the files end up less human-readable and editable.
A few steps which might together help:
Maybe the unique-id isn't needed and just using the project directory name suffices. I know I've had same-named files under multiple ~/gtd/Completed/20??/ directories, but maybe that doesn't matter at all.