One of the problems I’ve had in the past with implementing GTD using Backpack is that it’s hard to see ALL of your next actions, by context in one place. I have a next actions list for all of my projects, and I always wished that I could just get one master list of ALL my possible next actions, preferably by context. One solution I tried was to copy and paste each one into a master list, but this became particularly error prone for a forgetful person like me.

But in a rare spark of intelligence, I’ve just discovered (or more accurately, realised) that I can actually see all of my next actions, filtered by context, in one simple to view ‘list’, without creating a new page just by using the built in search function. All I have to do is search for “Next Actions context” and boom – all of them in front of me.

One neat thing is that since the search function returns the page title and text surrounding the string you searched for, most of the time you can actually see what project the Next action belongs to. And the next actions are clearly highlighted in yellow, so its easy to scroll through and pick!

Now I don’t have to worry about where I put my next actions – they could be as a note or a list. Its immediately so much more flexible than I could ever have dreamed of. Organic brilliance by 37Signals.

p.s. If everybody does this already, excuse me – I couldn’t find anybody writing about it online!

This sounds great – exactly what I want. Can you explain more – I don’t follow

Hi bob. I have a dedicated page for every project. In it, I have the usual things: a “Next Actions” list; “Waiting for” list; general notes etc.

To get a consolidated Next Actions list, I merely search for “Next Actions”, and the search page brings up all the places in my backpack where I have written “Next actions”.

Try it for yourself. You’ll see how easy it is.

You can obviously do the same for your waiting for lists too!

This sounds like a wonderful idea.

However, search has always been broken in my account. It misses a lot of items, most notably ones that have been there for a long time. I also don’t know how often the index is rebuilt.
I might try your suggestion, but doubt that it works reliably.

I’ve seen several comments about search not working correctly in the past, but no announcement of a solution by 37s. I wish search would be fixed, or at least there were an option to re-index everything (maybe that could solve the problem).

Update:

Now I tried it and so far, so good. The ability to search for newly entered items seems quite good (almost immediately), and I found all my test items.

Two problems, though:

(1) You get only a part of longer lists displayed as a result. Usually you shouldn’t have lots of items in your next actions list per project or context (I use a mix of context and project pages), though, so that’s probably of minor importance.

(2) When I looked for “waiting for:” (without the quotes), I got the desired results. Looking for “next actions:” (without quotes), however, gave me way too many hits, since those words are to be found in lots of places. Looking for “next actions:” with quotes gave me no results at all. So I resorted to add a unique abbreviation to each list (NXAC, WTFR) to make the search results more specific, which seems to work well.

I’ve just found the problem with search too – its not always completely accurate. I too hope that this gets fixed soon.

Regarding problems 1 and 2, I have started to implement this solution: Instead of having a list called “Next Actions” with a number of next action items, I have started to prefix each individual next item within the list with NA, which stands for Next Action.

Using this method, bringing up your complete list of next actions merely requires changing your search string from “Next Actions” (without quotes) to “NA”. This should solve problem 1 -since no matter how long your next actions list per project, if every one is tagged, then it’ll bring it up; and problem 2 – since you probably don’t have any other places where you have NA by itself, thus only the relevant matches will be shown.

2 things to note:

1. This may seem cumbersome at first, to prefix all your next actions, but it is more than worth it in my opinion. Plus, it’s only two letters!
2. If you like using Covey’s four quadrant system – Important and Urgent, Important and Not Urgent, Not Important and Urgent, and Not Important and Not Urgent – you can easily extend this by changing the prefixes to NAIU, NAIN, NANU and NANN. This is what I do, since I like to filter by the Urgent stuff and Important stuff.

I like GTD and I like backpack so I love to ocmbine the two. I have separate project pages, so getting all on one page by searching a searchstring sounded good.

I prefixed all individual actions with “NXAC”. Great. Now when I search it still doenst give me all my next actions… I get bits of the actions and not all of them.

Rheuven – this seems to be clearly a problem with Backpack’s fundamental search function. I guess we will have to wait for it to be fixed.

However, in the meantime, I’ve found that by going to the Page(s) (its not normally more than 2) where the search hasn’t revealed the next actions, it somehow rebuilds the search index and Backpack’s search function will then find them all.
It might not work for you, but it’s worth a try.

YinHong, thanks for your tip.

Unfortunately it does not work for me. I’ll post a feature request for showing all open actions.

I posted a feature request: http://forum.37signals.com/backpack/forums/18/topics/4199 to get an open task query.

I solved this problem (nearly) using the API – what I did was set up a script that sits on my own server and basically trawls each page in my account for a list called ‘next actions’ and prints out all the ‘open’ items in that list. It would probably be horrible to run on an account with lots of pages, but it does what i need it to do.
I did a little fiddling to print out links to the project page, if you were feeling extra adventurous I guess you could add basic editing features to check things off or whatnot, but if you are doing a lot of this kind of thing you might be better off with a basecamp account?