Feature Request: Use Calendar Week As Defer/due Date

The “Today” perspective you’re showing in that screenshot is a custom perspective; perhaps it’s one you created it in OmniFocus 1 at some point in the past? Or perhaps you opened a shared perspective file? (Opening a perspective file will add it to your synced database.) In any case, the reason it shows tasks from tomorrow is because the “Due or Flagged” setting is actually short for “Due Soon or Flagged”, where “Due Soon” means whatever you’ve configured it to mean in OmniFocus’ Date & Time Preferences. This Due Soon period defaults to 2 days, but you can change it to mean 24 hours—which I’m afraid still includes tasks due the next morning. There is a feature request in our database suggesting we offer the option for “Due Soon” to mean “Due Today”, which seems like a reasonable request to me. Oh man I’m snuggling with this too.

I just got Omnifocus for the Mac (trial Pro) and already have the iOS (Pro) version and trying to figure out a way to only show Todays taks so I can go through them throughout the day. The option is only Due Soon and this cn only be set to 24 hours, but 24 Hours bleeds in to the next day and that to me is very confusing and I must say counter productive is the whole point of GTD is to get things done with clarity and focus. I have played around with flags, with start dates, with due dates etc, but none will do what’s needed with just showing just Today’s tasks and only Today’s taks. Well, the trick with OmniFocus is that how to best do this is entirely dependent upon the workflow you want to use. The “Today” extension in OS X and iOS can be set to show only tasks that are “Due Today” and/or “Deferred to Today” with other options for showing tasks that are Overdue.

That might do what you want, depending on how you use dates on your tasks. This roughly mirrors what you would see in “Forecast” view within the OmniFocus app itself. Personally, I prefer to use a custom perspective, but this is tailored to my own workflow, which involves defer dates and flags, rather than due dates. I generally avoid giving something a hard due date unless it actually carries important consequences (usually external deadlines), as otherwise there’s an artificial sense of urgency with everything coming due when it may not actually be a priority.

For example, if I have a task that reminds me to clean up my desk, it might be something I want to get to today, but it’s not going to be the end of the world if it slips until later in the day, or tomorrow. On the other hand, if a client needs a report on their desk by 3:00, that’s going to have a “hard landscape” due date. So with that in mind, I use a custom perspective called “Hotlist” that includes the following settings:.

Group Actions by: Ungrouped. Sort Actions by: Due. Filter by Status: Due or Flagged. Filter by Availability: Available I then use a combination of flags and defer dates to build my “today” list. Keep in mind that weekly and daily reviews are a critical part of OmniFocus, although in my case my biggest focus is on the weekly review – basically planning my upcoming week. I usually only go through a daily review when I don’t already have enough on my plate for a given day.

So, during my weekly review, I go through my projects and take anything that needs to be done, and give it a flag. If I’m not going to do it today (Monday, in my case), I’ll also add a defer date for later in the week so that it stays invisible until that day. If it’s something I know I’m not going to get to this week, I just leave it for next week’s review. If it’s something that has a fixed date farther off, I’ll flag it and apply that as the defer date.

So in other words, my weekly review goes something like this for each task:. Am I going to do it today?. Am I going to do it later this week? Flag it and set a defer date. Is there a deadline on it? Set a Due Date.

If so, am I going to start working on it more than 24 hours before the deadline? Flag it as well. Is it something with a fixed start date in the future? Set that defer date, flag it. Is it something with a fixed due date in the future? Set that as a due date.

Feature Request: Use Calendar Week As Defer/due DateRequest:

Is it something I’m not going to get to this week? Leave it alone for next week’s review Repeating tasks are also part of this process, but they don’t normally form part of the review. They’re flagged with a defer date so that after they’re done, they just come back up the next time they’re relevant, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or on some other cycle.

Feature Request Use Calendar Week As Defer/due Date Calculator

Again, this method works for me, after several years of refinement and reading and participating in tips and discussions in here. It may not work for you at all, or it may spark a few ideas as to how you can do things with perspectives, flags, and defer/due dates, so take whatever you can from it:) I should note that I do also work in a few other perspectives, but they’re generally purpose-specific.

Household chores, for example, rarely get flags or due dates, as most of them are “when I have time” type of things, however they’re also repeating in most cases, so they get defer dates. I can then check my “Household” perspective when I have time to take care of a few of these things and see what’s there waiting for me. If something is important on that list, I’ll flag it to bring it into my Hotlist (e.g. Cleaning up because company is coming), but otherwise they tend to live outside of that.

I also take a similar approach to errands Unless it’s something important, it doesn’t get flagged, as it’s more of a list of “things to do the next time I’m out.”.

Feature Request: Use Calendar Week As Defer/due Date 2016

With one of the areas of improvement for the upcoming OmniFocus 3 being repeating tasks, I was curious if there are plans to allow for the deferring of single instances of repeating tasks without impacting the original repeat schedule? For example, I have a few yearly reminders for picking up birthday gifts.

They’re deferred to 3 weeks before the respective birthday so I have some leeway, and flagged so they show up in my primary working perspective. Depending on what’s going on when these tasks show up, I may or may not be able to act on them right away. In some cases, I want to defer that task a few days or a week, but I don’t want the original repeating task and it’s 3-week lead time impacted. Right now, my choices are to leave the task as-is knowing I won’t do anything with it for a bit, or create a new task that is separate from the repeat, and complete the repeating task. Neither is ideal - the former is a distraction cluttering up the list of tasks I need to focus on now, and the latter is somewhat of a nuisance, especially on an iPhone. It would be great if I could just defer the task I’m looking at given the circumstances of the moment, knowing the original schedule would stay intact and the next repeat would show up 3 weeks ahead of the birthday the next year. We know OF 3 will introduce more sophisticated repeat options, such as “due every second Tuesday of the month.” I wonder if this would allow for the functionality we are hoping?

I would expect not. But, what would happen if I defer until tomorrow a task set with repeat options “defer to every Monday” and “due every Friday.” Would it maintain these even if I push it forward a day without changing the repeat options? I guess it would depend on whether one could add BOTH those repeat options or just one. Lol, never mind, none of this makes any sense because of course you can’t have two simultaneous repeat options.

Of course, everyone has their pet issue, but this seems like a really big hole to me too. The power of using flags for charting your day and defer date changes for pushing things until tomorrow or next week, is awesome. Having to consider the impact of this on repeating items, totally breaks it for me. I believe some people use scripts to generate the repeating project or task, but I don’t want to get into that, as I know I would lose trust in the system (did I run the script etc etc?). Does anyone know of any other reliable workarounds at the moment? I’ve emailed support to OF as well.

Fingers crossed we’ll get it soon. I also would like this feature, but I use this workaround in its absence:. Make a new non-repeating sub-task of the existing repeating task.

Defer/set due date/flag of the new sub-task to when you want. Name the task “delete this task” (you can optionally add the original task description, but I rarely do anymore. When it pops up, DON’T mark it done, just DELETE IT. The original task is now available (and likely WAY overdue) My most common use is “take out the trash” which is normally Sunday night, but if monday is a holiday, my town shifts the trash day schedule out by a day. So, I create a “delete this” task deferred to tuesday 6pm and due at 10pm as a subtask of the recurring Sunday “take out the trash” deferred to 6pm, due by 8pm. To add to the fun, we only have every-other-week recycling and brush pickyup, except during the fall, where brush pickup is weekly, or the period from 2 weeks after Christmas to April, when there is no brush pickup.

All in OF so I don’t have to remember that monstrosity.;-). Well, it turns out that when OmniFocus shares a task using the share sheet on iOS, it shares more than just the TaskPaper information.

This includes a unique URL which allows me to mine the project name from it. Using this, I put together a workflow which creates a duplicate of the repeating task (with the ‘repeat’ settings removed) and places it in the same project as the original task. It then prompts you to check off the original task before leaving you in the project in OF so you can do wha Powered by, best viewed with JavaScript enabled.