Things' Auto Deferring
After using defer for Things for some time I noticed that I want to defer projects to the earliest child date - most of the time. After I implemented this in my defer shortcut I figured that this could also be achieved automatically.
I run this automation every hour so the projects will be shown/hidden more frequently.
This automation really helps me to have a clean projects list since my projects are automatically hidden when I cannot progress and will be shown when I can.
I chose to create a new Auto Deferred tag instead of reusing Deferred from my deferring shortcut so manually deferred projects won't be touched by this automation. But I grouped Auto Deferred in Deferred so I can easily filter for all deferred items.
How it’s implemented
It's one Shortcut which searches for all projects which are Open andAnytime. It will then check if the project has no Anytime items. It will then set the auto deferred date to the earliest date of its children. If there is no scheduled item (empty, only Someday) the project will be kept Anytime. The shortcut will also process any already auto deferred projects in the same way so they will be kept in sync with their children's dates.
Get the shortcuts
You need to manually create the Auto Deferred tag in Things for the shortcut to work.