Adding “Needs Review” as a filter rule in a custom perspective

[joelande]

I’m looking for a way to include “Needs Review” as a filter rule in a custom perspective. This is currently not listed as an option, so perhaps this is a feature request. Or is there a way of setting a “search criterion” for some hidden info?

Here’s the background on my use case:

I like to do my reviews by "area of responsibility” (Teaching, Research, Personal, Admin, etc): each area has its own folder of projects, and I have a project-based custom perspective for each folder.

There are several advantages of using such a custom perspective rather than built-in “Review” setting for my weekly reviews:

• This gives me much more control over how information is presented and filtered – key for prioritizing review tasks. For example, if I know that I’ve got limited time for a review and I don’t want to decision-fatigued before I get to the projects I need to review carefully, adapt the view settings to temporarily show “On Hold” or deferred projects, scan them quickly, and mark them all as reviewed.
• This allows me to review by area of responsibility, which keeps me focused on projects that are related, instead of seeing the flat list of projects under “Review”. (Of course, sorting that as “Ungrouped” does reflect the project order, and thus the folder order, but it is still a flat list – and often an intimidatingly long one, especially if I’ve fallen off the wagon on regular reviews.)
• This also allows me to break down the weekly review in such a way that I’m reviewing different areas on different days. For example, on Wednesdays, I do my “Teaching and Thesis Supervision” review, and Thursday I review my “Personal” area. Breaking it up helps prevent overwhelm.
• What I can’t do, yet, is adjust the filter rules to make the projects disappear as I review them withint this custom perspective.

So, to repeat, what I’d like is a custom perspective with two filter rules:

• Contained within project or folder:
• Needs Review

Does anyone have a workaround? I'll also send this as a feature request to Omni

[deaghean]

It wouldn’t help on iOS, but on Mac you can use the Focus feature to limit Review to specific folders.

Adding Review oriented options to custom perspectives is definitely a good idea, however.

[david_n]

You could use Flagging for Needs Review or a custom tag. Most of the dynamic things you can do with Omnifocus can be achieved with custom tags and a custom perspective that filters on that tag.

[joelande]

Thanks for this suggestion. I hadn’t even realized that you apply “Focus” to the Review perspective. This works really well.

[joelande]

@david_n Thanks for the suggestion. The thing is that adding a tag wouldn’t update automatically to reflect the “needs review” status. At which point, one might start thinking about an Apple Script & Hazel that toggles a tag depending on whether a task needs a review or not…. And then it’s probably better for me to take a deep breath and just go back to looking at my “Review” perspective and focus on one folder at a time, as deaghean suggested!