Looking for advice on tree clutter

[xja]

I am looking for suggestions on how to deal with the following issue.

I use a hierarchy of Goals > Projects > Tasks. Sometimes Tasks (those that are simpler and not worthy of being a project) are linked directly to Goals rather than to Projects. I have lots of other non-task info items (mostly web links, files, emails, contacts) linked to Tasks as well as directly to Projects and in some cases to Goals. I have 2 problems.

First, I really like to be able to see my Tasks in the context of the hierarchy. To do that, I go to the Goals parent, shift-left arrow to close all children, right arrow to open up the first level of children (the goals themselves), select all the goal items, right-arrow to expand their children (to show the projects), select all the projects, right-arrow to expand their children (to show the Tasks). This is a cumbersome process enough as it is. But, since some Tasks are at the same level as the Projects, when I do this it expands ALL linked non-task items linked to those Tasks. Also, any non-task items or folders of non-task items linked directly to Projects are expanded.... in other words, tons of non-task items are shown and makes the tree extremely cluttered and very difficult to view and access the Tasks in their hierarchy.

To make matters worse, when I complete a Task, to get it out of the way, I either have to move it out of the hierachy altogether or create a Completed folder under each Project to file the task into (which keeps it in the hierarchy but now creates another item under every Project that clutters up the view and navigation of the tree).

I have tried a few things.... (1) every time I go to another Task, I go to the Goals parent, shift-left arrow to collapse all children, then start navigating down the tree to get to the Task I want (with this I can't see all the Tasks in their hierachy and it takes many steps every time I want to access a Task, but it eliminates the clutter).... (2) I try to not link any Tasks to Goals, but rather insert a dummy Project item in between so all Tasks are at the same level of the tree.... (3) try to avoid linking any non-task items to Projects or Goals.

Most of the time I end up just working with the Search Results of a search that just finds Tasks, but of course the results aren't shown in any hierarchy.

None of these are ideal. This "tree clutter" really slows down workflow. Until some kind of tree filtering functionality is implemented, if anyone has had the patience to read through this lengthy post and to think about it, I would welcome your suggestions on how to deal with this problem.