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Looking for tips on avoiding multiple-checkbox-select mistakes.

misha.glouberman says:
I’ve been using RTM for just a couple of weeks. It’s mostly great, but one problem keeps coming up:

I often mistakenly perform actions on multiple selections that I mean to perform on just one. (eg: I select an item, click "complete", and, without meaning to, mark a bunch of items as completed).

I gather I’m not the first person to have this problem. I’ve found lot of messages asking for feature-changes to remedy it. (And I’d vote for those feature-changes, too). (see, eg: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/3114/ )

But I’d like to know if anyone has tips or suggestions for how to avoid these problems using the site as it is.

How do you avoid accidentally deleting/postponing/completing multiple items in cases where you thought you’d selected just one item.

Any tips/idea/strategies would be much appreciated!


Posted at 7:08pm on October 23, 2008
(closed account) says:
doesn't undoing the last action take care of this
Posted 15 years ago
ranbarton Power Poster says:
Sadly, no. You will not make any effort to undo something that you do not know you did.
Posted 15 years ago
misha.glouberman says:
The undo function is useful. I use it a lot to fix mistakes. But it'd also be good to find a way to make the process less mistake-prone to start with.

And, like Ranbarton says, the problem isn't just that it's too easy to make a really destructive, but also that it's too easy to make a really destructive mistake without noticing (which is the worst thing, and which undo *doesn't* help with).

Some other ideas:

- Getting in the habit of typing "n" a lot to deselect entries.

- Organizing tasks in such a way that no individual list ever gets too long. (Since longer lists feel like they naturally lead to more of the kind of human-error that I'm talking about, especially when you have to scroll to see the whole list). This may or may not work for most people, depending on how you like to organize things. (I've been a one-long-list person, but maybe I wouldn't mind being a many-shorter-lists person)

- I'm looking at using AutoHotKey to build my own keyboard shortcuts. Some really initial experiments look very promising. (Has anyone else tried this?)

Anyone have any other ideas?


Posted 15 years ago
misha.glouberman says:
Phew. As I look more into this, it gets more confusing.

There are, I think, three main ways an item can be "selected", and different functions of RTM act on different kinds of selection:

1) The Item can have its checkbox selected. Anywhere from 0 to all of the items can be selected this way.

2) The item can have the ">" sign pointing at it. I believe there is always exactly one item selected in this way.

3) The item can be highlighted, so that there's a line running from it to the "task" tap on the top-right of the screen.

The use of these three different types of selection seems pretty unpredictable. To postpone items, they need to be selected using method "1", while to change the date of an item, it needs to be selected by method "3"

Most confusingly for me right now, as I work on the AutoHotKey script: Method "3" seems to act differently depending on whether or not the list is scrolling. That is - when I create a new taks, it is always selected by method 1. But it's only sometimes selected by method 3. If the list of items is long enough to require scrolling, *and* the item's characteristics are such that it appears off the screen, then it is not selected my method 3.

The consequence of this is: If you type "N" "T" "Taskname" "enter" "D", you get unpredictable results. Sometimes you'll create a new task, and edit iits date. But sometimes you'll create a new task, and then edit the date of another, more or less random task.

Again - this seems to me like a problem....

Posted 15 years ago
This topic has now been closed automatically due to a lack of responses in the past 90 days.