because its not an active project…ticklers can be used to have things pop up for us to deal with in a different context.

it would be a nice feature.

and scheduling it to a furture date dosent automatically take it off the next action list.

Exactly. The nice thing about a tickler file (and in my opinion it is an essential part of GTD – without it the whole idea of getting it out of your mind falls apart) is, that I don’t have to think about something that I have to do in the future until I have to deal with it.

For example: I get the information that I have to submit a report in 6 months, then I can put that in my tickler system to resurface in 5 months, so I have 1 month time to finish the report. After the 5 months are up it has to pop up in my INBOX, not somewhere else!

At the moment I have to use a separate system, and am looking for an alternative to Nozbe. It’s a pity, because I really like the rest of it, and it would be easy to implement.

Torsten

i would agree with Tschenkel – it would make the inbox more useful, but to be perfectly honest it should be grouped differently as the inbox is currently treated as a half a trash bin practically as so much shows up there that it is counter productive in many ways i feel – this is one of the reason i always ask for the ability to remove actions as easily as i could check them off as completed. other wise it just piles up and becomes a mess.

i dont deny that it needs to be reviewed, my argument deals more with how the system design adds so much stuff to the inbox.

for example: contextual/group arrangment of items in the inbox that are related, deal with the same project or are most likley part of the same context (i.e. calls signified by the word “call” or a phone number in the task field)

this would cut down on the mess the inbox becomes by a lot. and even allowing users to arrange items in the inbox in groups would produce benefits for users by allowing us to arrange them by how we would like to review them.

@H2orocks4000: I don’t agree. The inbox is only a temporary storage. I use it only to enter new things. After a review nothing can stay in the inbox. The inbox in GTD-systems is unsorted by default. It only collects, after processing the inbox is empty and all its content has been sorted into projects and contexts.

I admit I have a project “unsorted” for things that don’t fit elsewhere.

At the end of the day, the inbox has to be empty for me.

So could someone explain what happens if I set a date for an action? I see that it appears in my calendar but that’s about it. Do I get any sort of reminder? Surely an email or something would be useful here?

Could you set up a reminder from the calendar? I can do this from Gmail and have it send me an email.Hope this helps.
Ellen

Sure I could. It just seems a bit stupid having to set a date which then syncs with a separate calendar which I would then have to visit and manually set the reminder!

i agree. reminders are missing. That’s why I’m mainly NOT using NOZBE at the moment. Toodledo or wundlist are sending reminders…

Back to the original suggestion – I think this is key. Other apps implement it differently (e.g., ToodleDo has “start date” and GetItDone has a “scheduler”) but essentially a Due Date is a hard deadline. The suggestion is to get the task out of the way until you need to deal with it, regardless of when it is due.

I also miss a tickler system, and hope it is coming. I´d think i like it to have it in the calendar view. And i do today, but the problem is that it gets too crowded/messy. I want to separate the ticklers and the normal calendar task today. It is now a problem to get a good overview, both online and on the phone.

I mostly use ticklers for stuff like;
- I perhaps want to go Miami next summer, but this is something i want to start working on in december, or perhaps i don’t want it then. So i create a tickler, that now is a regular actions, with a date in december: “Tickler: Consider starting up a project about a summer trip to Miami”

This is something i don’t want to create a project for, unless i am ready for it, and i want to be reminded about it in the future. So i might act upon it…

But isn’t that what Next Actions are for? You don’t see everything in Next Actions, only the things that are scheduled and matter.

So let’s say I have a hair cut as my next action under my grooming project. Since hair cut is a reoccurring item, I want it to show up as a next action on the day I am getting my hair cut but I don’t want to look at it all week. So right now I have deselected it as a Next Action. How am I suppose to remember to re-select it as the next action on the appointed day? This is why a tickler would be good.