Can we "Group By" Folders and Projects in Review perspective?

Hello,

I find my Review project list overwhelming – I have many many projects, and in Review they are not meaningfully grouped, so this causes me to have to fragment my consciousness as I bounce from topic to topic. As a result, I rarely do a proper Weekly Review.

I realize what would fix this would be to have the ability to Group projects in the Review perspective. For me, ideally this would be by Folder. I have project Folders for Work, Home, Family, Financials, Automobiles… and would like to conduct my project reviews in those contexts.

Would appreciate any insight from this group of Omnifocus gurus on how to approach this!

On the Mac, you can go to the Projects perspective and choose one folder such as Work or Personal. Then choose from the menu bar View > Focus on Work folder. The shortcut key is Command-Shift-F.

You can visit your review perspective and the only projects available for review are from the Focused folder. Hit Command-Shift-F to unfocus.

OmniFocus 4 for iOS/iPadOS brings the focus feature to your iPhone and iPad now.

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It’s not quite what you’re asking for, but I did just learn recently that if you go to the View settings in the Review perspective you can change the project sort order to ‘Unsorted’. Then they stay in the projects order, rather than the seemingly-random order that results from sorting by review date.

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thank you @wilsonng and @kaitlin – the combination of these two tricks gets me 99% there :). I really appreciate the help!

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I do not have my project reviews set to do on the day I do my weekly review. Instead I set a different schedule, some weekly some 2 weekly some monthly some 3 monthly and I tackle areas of focus on different days. For example I review all active “focus/big rock” projects every Monday morning but also at the end of each session working on that project. Home and Personal area projects get reviewed at weekends which seems to me logical. My weekly review is more a retrospective of what was done and achieved or missed and a plan for the coming week.

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How do you review home projects “every weekend”? I’d love to do something similar but the Review frequency field doesn’t allow you to specify day of week. My challenge is I’ll invariably review one on Friday and then “1 week” moves to the following Friday. Or Monday, then Monday. I would love to have an option to review e.g. “Every 2nd Saturday”. Task Due Dates allow this but Project Review dates do not :/

In those instances, review it on a Saturday and it’ll then pop up again the following Saturday (assuming that the review interval is set to one week.

Following on from @TheOldDesigner, change your projects to the frequency in which they need to be reviewed, some may be monthly, quarterly or even yearly. Divide and conquer.

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thanks. so that means if I’m a day late on review I need to manually re-set the next review date. that’s workable! just an extra step.

it would be ideal if, say for example I missed a Saturday review and didn’t get to it until Monday, when I clicked “Mark Reviewed” it reset to the following Saturday… rather than the current behavior where it goes forward +1 week to Monday. Recurring Task Due Dates work this way. Would love for Review Dates to work this way as well!

I use Saturday here as an example – what this would let me do is to time-block my reviews for certain days of the week. E.g. deal with House items on Saturday, Work items on Monday, Parenting items on Friday… (obviously they don’t all need to be every 1 week)

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The ‘Next Review’ date is really a due date to perform the review, based on your chosen review interval and previous review. The Review perspective displays all projects which haven’t been reviewed in time.

But nothing prevents you from reviewing projects earlier! My preferred way to review is to use the Mac app and go to project-based perspectives. I’ll look at some projects and make updates, and use the ‘Mark Reviewed’ command in the context of the perspective. This allows me to use several perspectives, starting with the most important stuff, and to go through my folder structure in order. I know what projects are important to me at any given time (if not, it means my project hierarchy needs reorganising). As a final quick step I’ll go to the Review perspective and check that there are no ‘overdue’ project reviews.

I don’t see much value in timing the ‘next review’ date exactly to meet a review schedule which I might miss anyway or choose to anticipate. Using the Review perspective is just a safety net that prevents projects from being forgotten entirely. This reminds me of the debate around ‘defer until’ versus ‘do on/start’ dates.

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