When you check a completed item, the current action is, it either stays as strike-out text or completely deleted. Instead of deletion, I would like to automatically move it to a specific file or folder or line, so that it can be deleted later if desired. I suggest this because sometimes looking at what has been completed can be quite useful.
The main problem is that you can lose context by moving an item in an outliner.
For example, let’s say you checked an item called “First draft” under “School > Semester 3 > SCI 101 > Mid-term project”.
If you move “First draft” somewhere else, it might make a less sense, since “School > Semester 3 > SCI 101 > Mid-term project” is also part of the information that defines what “First draft” means.
Even when two items have the exact same content, being under different parents means different things.
Obviously your Dynalist doesn’t look like what’s in the example, but you get the idea.
Therefore, to avoid losing the context, we recommend hiding the items for now (here’s how: https://help.dynalist.io/article/82-hide-checked-items), and use the “Delete checked items” to delete them when you no longer need them.
You can also use the “is:completed” search command to review checked items before deleting them.
I hope that helps!
And what about “rebuild / recreate / duplicate” entire tree under a “Completed itens” root item. So, in your exemple, it would be created a new node, “First draft”, (perhaps located in an exclusive doc only for completed itens) beneath of :
original document name > School > Semester 3 > SCI 101 > Mid-term project
A problem I see is when user renames, moves “original” nodes. It goes “out of sync”.
Yeah, that’s one of the big ones.
Also, if you first sent out:
original document name > School > Semester 3 > SCI 101 > Mid-term project
… and later sent out:
original document name > School > Semester 3 > SCI 101 > End of term project
How can we make sure they end up in the same tree, rather than recreating the tree a bunch of times? It’s a non-trivial challenge to solve.
As a result, we recommend leaving them at their place. With Search Everywhere and the “is:completed” search, you can review checked items across documents, and delete all checked items in a document when you’re ready to do so.
I have another conceptual suggestion for checklists that I think accomplishes the intent of this request. What if we could “archive” an item in addition to “checking” an item, and could chose whether to be able to see archived items separately from checked items. This would enable a usage mode I’ve had for a long time using the now-defunct “GOTasks” app with Google Tasks:
- Create checklist item(s)
- Check an item, but leave it visible for a while
- Archive all checked items (making them invisible)
Even better would be if the items were to save their “checked date/time” and “archived date/time” so we could see when the item was completed.