duncsully
commented
6 months ago I think I'm basically wanting to combine the feature concept for projects with this. Basically, make it so a concern can directly spin up a project, and within a project, include a notes/journaling field. A project can be relatively long-lived, but a concern should still be quick to create and to get through. A project becomes part of one's "daily review" to make sure a user is always on top of them.
Concerns are a slightly contorted adoption of a technique in Getting Things Done. The intent was to provide a place to dump thoughts as they arose, quickly and succinctly, without needing to figure out what to do with them right away. I do think providing a dumping ground is helpful, but another roadblock is in the knowing that a concern needs to be defined, ironically I don't put more nebulous thoughts down, mostly just ideas and TODOs to be fleshed out. I do think trying to define tasks going concern by concern makes sense, but I don't think it has to be a strictly linear process. Ironically, one of the whole points of OttaDo was to prevent bottlenecks to productivity.
So one change I'd like to make is to allow fleshing out a concern more like a freeform journal entry. A concern can be titled to help keep track of them, they'll automatically be dated, and then a user can (and will be encouraged) to journal about the concern for as long as they are unable to define next actions for it. So then when going through the define process, either the user should define next actions or they should be prompted to continue journaling.
In a far future state when I integrate AI, even if the models are difficult to run in real time on mobile hardware, I can at least let them "munch" on these concerns during idle time to help provide next actions.
I also previously treated a concern as disposable once next actions were generated from it, but I'd like to keep them around as reference material for the user. For one, they'd act as pseudo-projects in that a user could be prompted to see if after completing all related next actions, if their concern has been addressed. Second, it'd be a good reference collection for the user to see what various concerns they've previously addressed, especially if one resurfaces, they can see what they did previously.