I am struggling to set up a decent "Today"perspective on OF2 and since I have a large workload this is breaking my day!
Is it possible that anyone can help to set a “Today” Perspective that can help me?
I am a travel coordinator and my job is to provide travel arrangements for a offshore crew and by default every travel request must be done within 72h.
The travel request is done in parts and here is basically a background so that you can help me:
Read the request and understand what the traveller needs and check if the travel is compliant to company policies;
Ask the travel agent to provide me the flights options and fares plus hotels;
Follow-up the travel agent request if it is not answer within the next 4h;
If answered within the next 4h I have to read and compare it to the original request to make sure the agent did the correct job;
If all is good then I submit it t the traveler to choose the flights;
Follow-up his request if no answer is done within the next 24h;
If he answers then I ask the agents to have the tickets issued;
Follow-up the ticket issue process from the travel agent, which must happens within the next 4h;
Review the ticket after issued and also hotels;
Send the traveler his tickets and hotels plus other important documents;
Save his itinerary on a specific folder for control.
I have to follow this steps for every traveller and I have around a population of 140 people so controlling each request is crucial for my job but I am getting lost by using OF2 because my ˜Today˜ perspective is not helping that much… Beyond these tasks I have to deal with others and when I go to this perspective I got confused by Defer Date, Available or even Due dates, Remaining views.
I use Due dates as a deadline for answering the travelers, since I will have to complete his request in 72h. I tried the forecast but it does not get me the contexts I need, so I just get lost within Forecast and my ill-set-up “Today”.
Basically I need to see what I have to do today only (Defer), what is Due today, I do not want to see within next week or tomorrow for instance. Just “TODAY”.
Can you describe the way your current Today perspective is set up? At first glance, something like
Don’t use project hierarchy
Group actions by: Due
Sort actions by: Due
Filter by status: Due or Flagged
Filter by availability: Remaining
sounds like it might help, but that’s a bit of a guess…
I’d also recommend setting the “Due soon is in the next” preference to “24 hours” under the OmniFocus menu if you haven’t already done so.
(The “or Flagged” part of the perspective settings I mentioned lets you flag actions you need to do today and have them show up here regardless of the actual due date on that action.)
Thanks for your help, Brian. The tip about changing the “Due soon” helped a little as mine one was set to show the next 2 days!
After following your tips I managed to get my Forecast to be exactly the today (At first I found some weird stuff but then I realized the Due Dates and Defer dates were messing the views so I had to fix some Defer Dates being after Due dates on many tasks).
So after reflecting about this a little I came to the conclusion that when I check the Today list it would show me everything just like on Forecast but I would be able to tackle them down according to the Contexts.
Am right to consider this line of thought or have I just misunderstood it completely and by chance my Forecast and Today somehow got to be the same?
I am also confused about how Omnifocus displays Due Dates and Defer Dates and maybe this is shuffling my thoughts!
Happy to help! The intended use case of the Forecast view is very similar to what people generally had/have in mind when they set up a “Today” view, so it’s not too surprising that they ended up with similar contents. It’s mostly a matter of preference - some folks prefer to have that information laid out in a list rather than the way that Forecast presents it…
Regarding the Due/Defer dates; if you describe what you’re finding confusing, and I’ll see what I can do to clear things up. If it helps, the Defer date is generally used as a “Don’t distract me with this thing I can’t do yet” date. For instance, if you open up your “Today” perspective and use the View button in the toolbar to switch between the Remaining and Available filters, you’ll see that the latter one hides all the deferred items…
I am managing to have my Today perspective more accurate possible and also it helped me to understand better the behavior of Forecast perspective.
Since I am a new user to Omnifocus I am not yet savvy with the terms or configurations you have on the system, so I am confused many times by the Defer Date and Due Dates, but not by their definitions. The problem is actually related to the settings on each perspective and the behavior I should expect from each one of them. For instance, when I configure my Today I should consider the tasks I deferred to be available Today, the ones are Due today.
Now regarding the Flagged ones, I confess that still trying to understand how to use them correctly, but nonetheless the Today I would like to have is basically showing me Defer and Due for today only.
Another thing that keeps me annoyed is the fact that some Deferred/Due tasks are being shown on Tomorrow or even on Within Next Week. Is there anyway I can get rid of this?
