How to Keep Rejected Approaches and Next Steps Across Chats
When you switch chats, two things matter more than anything else: what you already ruled out, and the single next step. Ordinary summaries drop both. Here is how to keep them.
Why rejected approaches keep coming back
Open a new chat with a summary and it will cheerfully suggest the approach you rejected on Tuesday. You spend a round re-rejecting it — or worse, you accept it this time, because the original reasons did not survive the summary.
A rejection without its reasons is just an opinion. The reasons are what keep it rejected.
Why “next step” is not a summary
A summary describes what happened. A next step says what to do. Without one, the new chat opens with “so what should we do now?” — and you are planning again instead of continuing.
One explicit next action is worth more than three paragraphs of recap.
Save them as fields, not prose
Task state keeps these as separate, explicit fields:
- Excluded approaches — what was ruled out, and why
- Next step — the single action to continue with
- Confirmed decisions — settled, with reasons
- Completed work — done, will not be repeated
- Goal and current focus — so the new chat knows what it is working toward
The restore-and-confirm loop
In the old chat: “Save this task and prepare it for continuation.”
In the new chat: paste the continuation package. TaskOnward restores the full state — including excluded approaches and the next step — and shows it for your review.
Confirm only when it is correct. Then continue from the next step, not from a fresh round of planning.
What about the full discussion?
Task state is not an archive. The reasoning behind a rejection lives in its reasons field; the full transcript stays in the old chat.
What moves forward is the state of the work — decided, done, ruled out, next.
Stop re-rejecting the same ideas
Save excluded approaches and the next step once, and every new chat starts from where you actually stopped.