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Grouping Activities into Divisions

Division is a collection of activities and other divisions (subdivisions). All properties of divisions in this program, except division name, are completely determined by subdivisions and activities that it contains. For example, it might be convenient to put such activities as Jogging and (physical) Exercises into division Health (because they in general help improve or maintain the health). Then you can see easier whether you put enough attention to your health in general. In panels divisions have yellow color. The name of the enclosing division is automatically added by the program to the left of the names of the activities and subdivisions that are inside it with dot as separator. In the above example the full name of Jogging in division Health would be "Health. Jogging".

We would like to note here that the priorities of the divisions, although useful, are not as important as priorities of separate activities. It may happen that the priority of a division as a whole is low because most of its activities have low priories while the division contains an activity with very high priority. Of course such an activity deserves special attention and it can be most clearly seen rather in Priorities of Activities panel than in Priorities of Divisions panel.

To begin with, please, open sample simple.aap (see the beginning of the previous lesson to learn how to open a sample). Sample simple.aap is similar to file simple.aap that you might have created in the third lesson except zero input time.

Let us assume that you would like to create division Routine with three activities Work, Bills and Backup Files. Activity Work exists and we can use it simply moving into division Routine. To create division Routine, follow these steps:

  1. Activate a cell in an empty row of Input panel as you did while inserting new activities in the first lesson. You can actually activate any row in the root division. For example, you can activate a cell in Work row instead of an empty row because Work is for a while in the root division. In general you should activate a row in the division to which you would like to insert a new division.
  2. Click RIGHT mouse button in the active cell. The pop - up menu appears. Select Insert Division item clicking with LEFT mouse button at this item. You will see new division with the default name "New Division" with one new activity inside that has the default name "New Activity" . You can also insert new division with the Insert key.
  3. Activate the New Division cell as in the image above and type Routine. After you press enter, the name of the division changes for Routine and the name of its single activity becomes "Routine. New Activity", that means New Activity from the Routine division.
  4. Activate cell "Routine. New Activity" and type Bills (do not type Routine. because AAP adds the division name itself). After you press enter the complete activity name becomes Routine. Bills.
  5. To move activity Work into division Routine, activate cell Work. Than like in point 2 above click RIGHT mouse button in the active cell. The pop - up menu appears. Select Move To item. Move Item dialog box appears. Activate the division to move to in Input Panel (that is in our case activate cell Routine) and click OK in Move Item dialog box (see Move Item dialog box topic for more details of an activity moving).
  6. To create activity "Backup Files" in division Routine we first create New Activity in Routine and than rename it as it was done for the case of Bills. To insert a new activity into Routine activate cell Routine. Than like in points 2 or 5 above click RIGHT mouse button in the active cell. The pop - up menu appears. Select Insert Activity item. New activity with complete name Routine. New activity appears in division Routine. Activate Routine. New activity and type Backup Files (it is similar to point 4 for Bills).
Now Input Panel should look like. Notice that activity Work has changed its name for Routine. Work after the moving.

You can create other divisions in the root division similar to the creating of division Routine. You can even create a division inside other (named) division although we would not recommend it because such a structure is usually looks over complicated and is difficult to work with. The image of a typical structure that we would recommend is in Division View help topic.

The entering the time part and the spent time for activities in a named divisions is the same as for activities in the root division and was described in Lesson 2 and Lesson 3. Time parts, priorities and spent time of the named divisions (yellow rows) are completely determined by activities that it contains (see technical details). AAP calculates them automatically. So you should enter spent time to white rows in Input panel only.

If you have several named divisions it is convenient to compare their priorities in Priority (divisions) panel (see Division View topic for details. You can switch to Division View with button in toolbar at the bottom of the main window.

Additional information about the actions that you can perform in Input Panel you can find in How-to List for Input Panel


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