Forecast for deferred tasks / projects

First of all: Forecast view is great!

There’s one thing I desperately miss though: I heavily rely on deferred dates to clean up my lists and schedule tasks for future dates (how I schedule: deferred + flagged -> Today perspective on start date). On the iPhone, there is an option to show deferred tasks in forecast mode alongside due tasks. This way you can quickly see how many tasks will pop onto your task lists on a given date. I would love to have this option on the Mac as well.

Furthermore, it would be great if I could not only see these deferred tasks if I click on / tap a date, but if the calender contained two numbers: one for due tasks and one for deferred / scheduled tasks starting that day. This is something that even the iPhone version does not do right now, and I’d like to see it in both.

Background: If that option was available, it would become much easier to plan ahead and structure your week. This is the one thing I still miss when I remember my Things year a long, long time ago. Firetask also has a nice calender view in which you can drop tasks onto dates if you know when you are going to do them. That’s what I’m still missing in OmniFocus, and having deferred tasks in Forecast view would be a huge step in the right direction. In my personal workflow, ideally it would be only tasks which are deferred and flagged which will show up in my Today perspective, but I guess this is nothing that will ever happen. ;)

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If you click on the ‘Eye’ icon in the toolbar, you will see that amongst the configuration options for the Forecast view, there is a checkbox to ‘Show deferred items’.

Thank you very much! I completely missed that.

Now all I would love to see is the number of deferred items in the sidebar calendar. Right now I still have to click each day to see the deferred items, or to select a longer stretch of time, which is just not as good as numbers would be.

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I totally agree with this. I use the Forecast to schedule my items and level the workload from day to day based on the number counts within the Forecast calendar. The only way you can do this currently is to apply Due dates to the items rather than Deferred dated.

It would be much better if, as frevo has suggested, the Calendar can contain a count of either Deferred, Due or both items in the calendar.

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I have exactly the same feature request. Without a counter in the calendar view deferring does not really work for me as I do not see an overview of my workload day by day and can not balance it efficiently. Please add this feature, very very needed.

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I would appreciate this feature too! If you follow the GTD method 100%, start dates (deferred in OF) are even more important than due dates. So it would make a lot of sense if we could see them in the forecast as it is with the tasks with a due date!

Agree. Please add this feature. More broadly, try to improve your calendar-related features. Whenever I request or express a desire for better integration with calendars (e.g. my main Mac calendar) or improvement of a calendar-related feature, I encounter people lecturing me on how Omnifocus isn’t meant to work like a calendar, etc. etc. etc. (Omni’s official documentation does a bit of this lecturing too.) I do not need the lectures on how I should not be using Omnifocus as a calendar; I (and many others) would benefit from the added functions. (The functions I’m referring to are functions like the feature requested here, and better integration with the calendar programs…the current integration/sync is minimal and often useless, particularly for those of us who don’t rely heavily on due dates.) If other people don’t like the functions, make them optional. If Omnifocus thinks they run against the grain of Ominfocus’s main method or underlying theory or wordlview or whatever, then go ahead and say so and advise people not to activate the functions or to exercise caution. But please make them available for those who prefer them. It would’t be so hard, you’d earn more money, and people would be happy. Thanks for listening.

Also looking for this feature. How again do you activate deferred items in the calendar on iOS?

this is a bump

I totally agree with everyone here. I have learned a lot from various sources (especially MacSparky, and OmniFocus’s Manual) to use defer date instead of due date, and only use due date when it is really due (the Mar’s Exploration example?).

But trying to adapt to this methodology is just hard when you cannot see the number of items that are becoming available for today. Yesterday I looked at my apple watch and i had 0 for today, i was confused, until I opened my Mac version to see that i actually have 5 items were deferred to today and most i can take action on.

It is better to have these actions that are becoming available or are available to show in numbers, like due dates. Maybe use the black/grey color for numbers instead of amber/red for due dates. But it is plain confusing to have 0 for today.

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