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WORK around for lack of " Hide Until.."

(closed account) says:
there have been several requests for a a " Hide Until...." feature , a start date feature, or a calendar in the last couple of weeks. now it may come, but OTOH, it may not.. or come only as part of the PRO plan ( yes, call me a cynic....).
The problem is with
* repeating tasks ( pay phone bill)
* tasks with distant due date ( buy gift for bob's birthday when bob's birthday is next June).
short of going to other apps, the best workaround suggested so far has been purely smart lists. However, they dont really HIDE those tasks. And some of the Smart List queries suggested can get a little arcane for us non coders.
.
My tip: have two additional lists, one called Deferred for items like Bobs birthday gift and one called Repeating for those bill payments. that way you don't have to see those pesky tasks until the reminder pops up.
i also use a couple of simple Smart Lists that I run regularly: next 7 days and Priority One. i do that to make sure nothing sneak s up on me.
Generally, I think its a good idea, btw, to process tasks out of the Inbox to specialty lists in true GTD fashion. aim for that Zero Inbox.
Hope this heps.
Posted at 11:55pm on September 12, 2007
raymond.bergmark Power Poster says:
Or you could add a tag:zzz to all tasks where the due date is actually a start date (and the dated task should be hidden until that date). Then, at work for instance, you could have a smart list searching for:

location:@work AND NOT (dueAfter:now AND tag:zzz)

The latter part "sleeps" tasks until the due date (and time) has passed.

I use this for things like cleaning the fridge where I don't want to be reminded all the time. Also, there is no need to move the task to another list.
Posted 16 years ago
fuzzy76 says:
Or use a bit-literate approach which means you ONLY look at tasks due today (or are over-due).

I spend all my time in a saved search for
dueWithin:"1 day of today" OR dueBefore:today
which means I do not have to clobber my list with tasks not intended for "right here and now".

I also have a search for "due:never" which lets me review all tasks which doesn't have a due date set (which are tasks that aren't that important, but more for "when I have nothing better to do".
Posted 16 years ago
crystal.mckenzie says:
Like fuzzy76, I also just look at tasks due today or overdue, and just wanted to point out this:

dueWithin:"1 day of today" OR dueBefore:today

is equivalent to:

dueBefore:tomorrow

:)
Posted 16 years ago
lwallach says:
Based on the suggestions above I came up with another way of approaching this. I wanted to have a list that displayed all my tasks that had due dates but also to filter out things that I wasn't going to need to think about for a while. However, different items might need different amounts of time that I should be alerted to them. For example, there might be something that I should see 30 days before it's due, and that completing it even 30 days beforehand would be perfectly fine. Other things might require getting them done on a specific day, so shouldn't be visible until very soon before - say 2 days.

So I came up with a system of a few different "snooz tags" if you will: zzz2d, zzz7d, and zzz30d. These could be added to by however many more (or less) are useful for you. Next, for the list, I filter it so that the zz2d tasks only show within 2 days of the due date for that task, the zzz7d show up only within 7 days of the due date of that task, and so on. Here is my search criteria for the smartlist for anyone who might be able to use this:

(not(due:never) and not tag:zzz2d and not(tag:zzz7d) and not(tag:zzz30d)) or (tag:zzz2d and dueWithin:"2 days of today") or (tag:zzz7d and dueWithin:"7 days of today") or (tag:zzz30d and dueWithin:"30 days of today")
Posted 16 years ago
lwallach says:
Small typo in the above search. This should work better:

(not(due:never) and not(tag:zzz2d) and not(tag:zzz7d) and not(tag:zzz30d)) or (tag:zzz2d and dueWithin:"2 days of today") or (tag:zzz7d and dueWithin:"7 days of today") or (tag:zzz30d and dueWithin:"30 days of today")
Posted 16 years ago
lwallach says:
Just to reiterate, this method is pretty flexible as it lets me determine how long I want to let a given task be hidden before it's due, and some tasks I can decide not to hide at all. I can also institute this filter in one of my lists, some of them, or all of them. So far I haven't decided which lists to use it on other than the one list that displays only tasks with due dates...
Posted 16 years ago
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