Logging Things Done (faster)
A earlier post on ActivityOwner.Com introduced a GyroQ tag to mark a task complete in a dashboard or map and save a copy of the task in a year/month/date-sorted “completed” map. The tag works well, but can be a little slow as the “completed” map grows in size. While GyroQ’s selection commands work well for building and modifying small maps, they currently don’t scale well to large maps. I understand Gyronix has some fixes in mind, but in the meantime I got a request to try to speed this particular tag up with a macro.
The new mark_task_complete.mmbas macro in the macro library builds on the approach of the “mtc” tag. It allows you to select more than one task to mark complete and complete the logging phase almost instantaneously. This version logs to a “CompletedLog.mmap” file in your default MindManager directory. If you were using mtc, you should rename your “timelog-yourname” map to “CompletedLog” or edit the code. If you don’t have a “CompletedLog” map, the macro will create it for you. It opens and closes the map hidden so you need to open CompleteLog.mmap manually to confirm that it is working.
The downside of using macros instead of tags is that the installation process is more complicated. With GyroQ, you just paste the packed-text of the tag into its dialog box and you are off and running. To use this macro, you need to copy the text from the site into the MindManager macro editor and then save the file as “mark_task_complete.mmbas”. There are a number of places you can save it, but I’d recommend saving it in “My Maps\AO” to make it compatible with future tags/macros.
Once you have the macro saved, you can add it to your topic menu and topic context menu by choosing “tools”,”macro”, “macros”, “add”. Set the name as “Set Activit&y Complete and Log”, under “path” browse to the location you saved the macro, and under “menu” choose “Topic”. Repeat the process above and choose “Topic Context menu” to access it by clicking right on a topic.
The & symbol enables shortcut access via Alt-c-y. You likely need to remove the ResultsManager “Set Activit&y Complete” entry to avoid conflicts.
While you are in the mode of adding macros, you might want to add mindreaderNLP.mmbas to your “topic Context menu” as well if you are a “MindReader” user. That provides a quick way to “process” selected topics into marked up activities. If nothing else, it is a quick way to put action item boxes on them.
Another option is to run the macro with GyroQ using a tag with code below:
{run:macro:’AO\mark_task_complete.mmbas’}
The “dit”,”diw”, and “dim” tags can be changed to have analogous speed improvements, but the above provides a start for those that are interested. [edit: Note — these are now obsolete — see comment below].
Let me know if you have questions.
Entries 
ActivityOwner said,
March 3, 2007 @ 6:56 pm
OK — I just voted three of my favorite tags off the island. “dit”, “diw”, and “dim” have been obsoleted by an updated mark_task_complete.mmbas file.
If you include the “category” of “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”, or “yearly” in a task, mark_task_complete will log it done, but instead of marking the original done, it will instead advance the due date the corresponding amount. It also advances the start-date to be some amount of time prior to that due date. That interval is probably a function of personal preference.
This had an added advantage of preventing mark_task_complete from mistakenly marking a repeating-task complete.
It would be handy to have a “procrastinate without actually doing” feature, but we’ll leave that as something you have to do manually :-).
Hans said,
March 14, 2007 @ 12:50 pm
Bug in the InStr(cats,”day”) section, after id d>0 ?
Should be: t.task.duedate = date+d-weekday(date)
without the iif statement…
Hans said,
March 14, 2007 @ 12:53 pm
correction
the iif statement should be there, except the 2 occurences of ‘1’ should be repaced by ‘d’
ActivityOwner said,
March 14, 2007 @ 11:20 pm
Thanks Hans! I should have caught that one. I borrowed that line of code from the MindReader’s “Sunday” branch and forgot to edit in the second “d” to make it generic. At least it was right one day a week :-). I uploaded a corrected version.