I have another great Idea for Omnifocus: “Intelligent suggestions for OF tasks” !
Idea: While viewing a task / creating a task OF will give us a glance onto other tasks in other projects/perspectives, which we might have not thought about, but it still makes sence to think about them. So the AI would kind of help us to connect two tasks/projects etc we would never have thought of before. (The computer would kind of help us to connect dots we havet seen before.) This is similarly being done in Evernote, Devonthink or Apple Mail. Also in this forum AI is being used to show you similiar projects while creating a new one.
One could implement this function as a second review tab also, so when you wanna go crazy with your tasks and see them in different constellations you can just hit a button or a topic etc and the AI gives you a bunch of tasks where it would make sence if they would be connected. I know you could build that up yourself with contects perspectives etc, but this AI thing would help you a lot building those views and could make you creative even if you have a solid tag and perspective system. So let me know what you think about this.
Maybe we can bring this feature to live in OF 3.5 alltogether with a trash bin of course ;))
I’m not saying it can’t be done. The Omni folks are very smart.
The difference between OF and Evernote, is that OF tasks have relatively little text (I’m guessing that the average task is less than 20 words) than an Evernote which can have hundreds of words.
What you’re suggesting could run along the lines of Tags or Hashtags in grouping similar items, but the last thing I would want is for my flow to be broken by a task I don’t need to do popping into view.
Okay you are right witht the amount of words part. But I was thinking more of the inspector sidebar, where you have something like “context or similiar tasks”.
Why I am mentioning this is because sometimes when I edit a task I am like: “I think I have a similiar task somewhere in another project”. This Artificial Intelligence context would help me to solve this problem or I could even see connections between tasks I never saw before.
Sure you could argue that you could use the review function to get a better overview of your tasks, but I see it as a nice feature.
I’d be interested in seeing a sentient AI suggest things to me. But I’m not sure I want something nagging me about doing something else when I have more pressing needs right now.
I’m OK with batching similar tasks inside a custom perspective and referring to those instead. If I’m working on all Mac work, I’ll visit my @Mac tag to see what I can do. I already group my errands into an errands perspective with location alerts. Or I might just focus on just one project and work in there.
I wonder how we would be able to “train” OmniFocus to learn our preferences and habit?
There’s no getting away from this. Reviewing projects keeps us aware of current project statuses. If I started to rely on an AI to remind me, I’m gonna use that as a crutch and probably start forgetting about curation. Reviewing forces me to determine whether a project is still worth doing. I’ll delete it if I don’t think it is worthwhile. Or I might find that I need to clarify the next actions further if I’m stuck in a project. I wonder how we could teach the AI our personal views and preferences? That will be a coding challenge to ponder.
I did think about an AI for OmniFocus but I’m not willing to wait. I got work to do and will probably have to wait for the next generation of computers before a commercial AI becomes affordable and can be quickly included in consumer products. Siri and Alexa are the first step. We’re not yet there.
