I’ve read that once you manually drag items in the Tags view, it permanently locks into that custom order. New items get appended to the bottom, and the automatic project-order link is severed, with no way to recover it.
This feels like a design trap. One accidental drag and you’ve broken the view forever.
I could resort to making a custom perspective, but surely the built-in Tags view shouldn’t have this flaw in the first place. It’s a core feature that should be reliable to use without fear of permanently breaking it.
Is this really how it works, or am I misunderstanding something?
Yes that’s a good suggestion, if you don’t mind always having due and flagged items sorted to the top. I’d rather just be able to revert to projects order, but this is better than nothing.
I try to avoid thinking of OmniFocus as a productivity tool, since there’s so much that’s clearly missing in terms of basic usability (especially if you aren’t using it on a Mac). Regular users of this forum are really eager to share their coping mechanisms, sort of a defend the product to the death thing. That’s ok, but it doesn’t lead to much of a drive for improvement.
Suggesting switching the view back after you’ve switched it seems normal. I understand being surprised that re-ordering switches into custom order view without a confirmation, and it’d be nice to have a sort of hybrid of ordered and customized that tries to guess at your intention when you drag and drop.
I try to avoid thinking of OmniFocus as a productivity tool, too. It’s for tasks and perspectives. How I react to that knowledge is up to me. I like OmniFocus, and I try not to get upset that there might be others out there who like it more than me.
