Confusing behavior in Forecast w/r/t deferred tasks?

OmniFocus OmniFocus for Mac
#1

I’m new to OF(*) and a little confused by one piece of behavior that I’m seeing.

In Forecast view, I have “Show Deferred Tasks” unchecked in the View menu; however, I’m seeing Deferred tasks that have a due time today (tasks I’ve marked as deferred until this evening, but need to get done this evening). If I check the “Show Deferred Tasks” box, I see duplicates of the deferred tasks, as well as those that don’t have a due time.

If I uncheck “Show Deferred Tasks” on the Forecast view, my expectation would be that I wouldn’t see deferred tasks at all. And even if I do check it, I’m a bit confused by the duplicates.

Is this a bug, and if not, can someone explain me the intended design? So far I love OmniFocus, but I’m not really understanding this particular behavior or the intention of the “Show Deferred Tasks” checkbox.

Thanks!
Adam

(*) Well, I used Kinkless kGTD back in the day, but never switched to OF, instead making a long detour through various other tools, most recently Things, until I finally decided the power of OF was worth the cost :)

#2

The “Show Deferred Tasks” checkbox determines whether you see the dedicated Deferred section in each day in Forecast. This section includes all tasks with a defer date set, and is meant to show you tasks that might become available on a particular day.

OmniFocus will always include tasks that are due on a given day in Forecast under that day, even if they’re deferred. The idea is that you’ll need to plan to complete something on or before that day, even if it might not be doable quite yet. Hiding deferred tasks altogether in Forecast might surprise some people when a new almost-due task pops up after its defer date passes – we certainly want you to be able to meet a task’s due date!

The duplicates appear if a task is both due and deferred on the same day. OmniFocus leaves those duplicates there in case you’re only looking at one section to plan out your day. It also helps if you have a lot of tasks falling due on a day, so you might not see the deferred section (or vice versa).

Does that help?

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#3

Thanks! It’ll take some getting used to. Still trying to figure out my workflow.

#4

If you can always do a search in your favourite search engine for the terms:

“omnifocus 2” workflow

Look for examples of other people’s workflow and adapt pieces from each workflow to create your own workflow.

From what I’ve gathered, it appears that most of them go through this:

  1. Planning
  2. Doing
  3. Reviewing

Another post about workflows is here:

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