Todo list manager that lets you queue next actions out of sight

Question

I'm currently using Remember The Milk for my organisation system that is based on GTD.

One thing that I find is missing from my system is the ability to capture all the actions relating to a project. For example, if I need to:

• "get new tyres for car"
• but first "check how much new tyres will cost to see if I can afford it"
• but first "call Bob to ask about the tyre place he recommended to me"
• but first "find out what Bob's new telephone number is"

Then I'll just put "find out what Bob's new telephone number is" on my Next Actions list (create a task in my Remember The Milk inbox). I can't put in the other three because they are not yet actionable.

When I complete that first action, there is nothing to remind me that the whole reason I was doing this was so that I can "call Bob to ask about the tyre place he recommended to me".

Is there any way in Remember The Milk, or some other todo list manager, to queue up a list of next actions that stay out of sight and appear in sequence?

So that, for example, when you check off "find out what Bob's new telephone number is", then the next action "call Bob to ask about the tyre place he recommended to me" will pop up and take it's place.

Answer 1

E. g. OmniFocus and ThinkingRock can do such things: several tasks in a project can be defined as "parallel" or "sequential". The latter choice would be yours: if the first next action in the sequence is marked as done, the next one is activated automatically. The other tasks in the sequence stay hidden.

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A "leight-weight" solution which works well with every system from paper to any software (taken from Michael Linenbergers "Total Workday Control" method and book) is the following:

After the subject of the first task write e. g. MORE:

e. g. Find out Bob's phone number MORE and then you know that there is a second task (dependent on the first one) to activate and should do that before you mark the first task as done and might forget about the second one.

Answer 2

If your a command line junky Task Warrior will allow you to do this. Lets say I enter a bunch of tasks so the numbers used to reference them are 1, 2, and 3. then

task 2 dep:1
task 3 dep:2

Then when using the "unblocked" report only task one will show up. When you mark task 1 as done task 2 will show up. I use dependencys heavily enough that I changed the default ls report to be the unblocked report.

Answer 3

Hiveminder has task dependencies. They are very flexible - you just specify that one task comes before or after another and then the the dependent tasks are hidden by default.

Answer 4

The iPad app "Thinkbook" does exactly what you are asking for in a nice way (and yes, I'm a new addict, er, user). It allows the creation of 'dashboards' that can show X number of upcoming tasks for whatever tagged projects/pages/notebooks you tell it to check on. When you complete a task on the dashboard, it updates the original data (or vice versa), removes the completed item, and adds the next thing in the queue. Simple, customizable (please show me two tasks from A and six tasks from B and none from C), and clean. I also use it because I can layer (indent?) tasks with multiple prereqisites within their primary project and still review things easily.

I honestly didn't think it would be all that useful until I started trying it out, and now I'm glad I gave it a shot.