Orphaned Items in Things
I don't know how you handle things (pun intended) but for me every project and every todo have to live in an Area.
However from time to time there were some todos which somehow slipped through and weren't assigned to any parent. Mostly because I assigned a date and didn't assign a parent.
I fixed this by creating a shortcut which I run periodically and marks those todos.
How it’s implemented
I noticed that todos and projects without a parent assigned are always sorted at the beginning when using Find items without special sorting.
The shortcut first removes Orphaned from all items - this cleans up any newly assigned items.
Then the shortcut fetches the first 15 items excluding Areas and Headings. Then it iterates over them and adds Orphaned any item whose Parent ID is "". It stops as soon as the first Parent ID with a value is found.
When there are orphaned items a notification will be shown. I use Toolbox Pro for the notification as it allows to add a link to the notification so tapping it will bring me right into Things with the Orphaned tag shown. If you don't want to buy Toolbox Pro you can just replace the unknown action with the notification action provided from Apple Shortcuts. I will rewrite the notification part with one of my apps as soon as I've published it to the App Store. My app will be free for this use-case of sending notifications.
I run this shortcut hourly along with some other housekeeping shortcuts (e.g. auto defer.
Caveats
- The notification will only be shown when there are less than 15 orphaned items. (Increase the fetch count if this is likely to happen.)
- If there are multiple orphaned projects it will only show the first project and all todos. This could be fixed by checking for the first
Areafound. But this increases the chance that the notification isn't shown. Since all items in the project also count against the 15 fetched items.
Get the shortcut
You need to manually create the Orphaned tag in Things for the shortcut to work.