TODO lists with lots of items, how to create and manage?

[gax]

Thank you, that is a good video, what he says at about 5 min how to use the sidebar is very useful.

Where I run into limitations is when I have a lot of sub items, let’s say a shopping list with many items.
Currently I paste, and then go through item by item with ctrl-enter to change the todo state.

I found this query to exclude sub-items from a search:

How to keep subtasks out of your TODO queries when their parent task has switched from TODO to DOING

This was driving me crazy, and I’m so pleased with the result. The problem: every time I switched a top-level task status to DOING, all of its subtask todos would suddenly appear in my todo queries, so that dozens of really granular tasks like “sand off rust” or “research microphone cables” would be cluttering up a list of high level tasks like “buy a house” or “career change.” Here’s the query that solves the problem. The trick was defining a recursive rule in the inputs that checks if a bloc…