Taglog tutorial - Actions

  This program uses the term 'Action' where some systems use 'Task'. It describes something which you intend to do. Actions work best if they describe a small lump of work. That way you can cross them off quickly. A future release of the program may have the ability to specify high level tasks, and then split them into finer detail, but the present version is aimed at detailed tasks.

Adding actions


To add an action use Actions/Add... in the main menu.

Most of the fields should prompt you to ask yourself questions about the action
 
 

Priority
How does it fit in with the other things I have to do ?


This program uses priorities where the numerically lowest are most important. The default priority is 50. This may seem like a large number, but the idea is that if you consider a scheme of priorities like

  1. Emergency
  2. Urgent
  3. Important
  4. Fairly important
  5. Default
  6. Non urgent
  7. Wishlist
  8. May get around to doing eventually
  9. Heat death of the universe may occur first
If someone asks you to do a piece of work, or you generate a job for yourself, pick a suitable priority in this range - then multiply it by ten. You can then fine tune the priorities of individual actions to decide which of the Urgent actions should be done first.  Note that the priority may be used in a future release to estimate elapsed time spent on an action on the assumption that you will spend (100-priority) percent of your time on that task - i.e. it will estimate that you will spend 90% our your time on a priority 10 task, 50% on a priority 50 action etc.
 
Expected-completed-date
Is there a deadline ?
Abort-after
Will it go away if I dont do it ? - If this action has not been done by this date then we can forget it.
Risks
What are the risks ?
What can be done to minimise them.
Assigned-to
Is there someone more appropriate who could do it ? Someone cheaper, someone more experienced/specialised, someone less busy ?
Reason
Why am I doing this ?
Description
What am I supposed to do ?
Deliverables
How will I know when the action is complete ?
Difficulty
How much thought has to go into it ? Often you have some tasks which you must do, which are routine, some which require original thinking. You probably also have times of day when you feel more alert. You may want to match difficult activities to your peaks, and save some easy ones for your troughs.
Status
Do you need to start it now ?

 

 

The possible values for Status are:

Actions start as Pending and become Active (or they may start as Active as soon as they are entered). They end up Completed or Aborted
Resources
What do I need to do this task ? Do I have all the resources I need ?
Expected-time
How long will it take (in time spent working on it)
Expected-cost
How much will this cost (apart from the cost of your time)

Integrating actions with time logging

If you click on the Action label in the centre menu bar you will be presented with a drop down list of the actions which are currently in the Active state. Selecting one of these actions will set the current project to the project associated with that action, and that action will be associated with the current log entry. You can thus use taglog to track how long an action has taken.

You can clear the current action by selecting the action titled "--" from the list.

Viewing Actions

  The Actions/View menu item allows you to view your actions. You can select the actions to view according to the Project they are associated with, their Status or their Priority.

You can also select the fields from an action to be displayed - this can be useful to allow you to see a summary of the actions, showing, for example, only the titles of the actions.

You can also select actions by the date they are expected to start, or to be completed.

You can select individual actions by Id (which is not very useful most of the time as action Ids are not very memorable) or by title. The Id and Title field names are menu buttons, and when you select them you get a list of all the titles, or Ids, which match all the other criteria you have selected. The menu entries for these buttons are only updated when you click on the Refresh button to their left.

Editing Actions

When you have viewed a set of actions, as described above, you can right click on an action and this will bring up a new window allowing you to edit it.

Changes you make by this means do not trigger any of the processes which can happen when you change the attributes of an action by other means within the program - for example if you change the status of an action there will not be a mail message generated to the Email-status-to recipient.

Changing the Status of an action

In the Actions menu are entries which allow you to Complete an Active action, to Activate a Pending action and to Abort actions which are Active or Pending. These present a menu of the titles of all the actions in the appropriate state (for example all the Active actions are presented for completion). Simply select the action by its title and it will be changed to the new state.

Viewing the History of an action

In section 1 of the tutorial you saw how to view all the log entries which were associated with a particular project, over some space of time. As you start to use actions more you may find that you want to view the history of an individual action.

This is done via the Actions/History menu item, which brings up a selection box similar to that used to view an action. This time you are likely to want to only select a small number (often just one) of actions, and each one will be displayed in its own window with all the log entries associated with that action.

You will see the key information about the action in the top frame of the window, including the total time spent so far on this action, and (if it was specified when the action was added) the Expected-completed-date and the Expected-time.

The next frame contains the history of the action, showing what was done, and when.

At the bottom of the History Window is a 'Revise' button. Pressing this button causes the action information to be updated with a Revised-expected-completed-date and a Revised-expected-time. Note that these are stored as different fields in the action, so you can see the difference between your original estimate and the current estimates of how long the action will take, and when you expect it to be completed.

The bottom of the history window also provides a button to allow you to save the history of the action to a file, and a Cancel button - to remove the window.

Shortcut to editing the current action

If you right click on the word Action in the central menu bar, while there is a current action shown in the box next to it, then a new window will pop up which will let you edit the current action.

Long term action maintenance

After you have used actions for a while you will find that the current actions file will grow. From time to time, depending on how heavily you use actions, you may want to move old actions to an archive file.

To do this select Actions/Extra.../Archive Old Actions from the top menu. This will move all actions which were Completed or Aborted more than one month ago to an archive file, called actions-yyyymm.tag, where yyyy is the year and mm the month of the date of the archive.

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Author: John Lines john+taglog@paladyn.org