Custom perspective to show only actions available in my current location

I was wondering if there is a way to create a custom perspective that will show me all my Available items but exclude ones that are tagged with a location other than the one I am in at present?

To give an example of a use case, suppose I am a member of the public library in my home town and need to renew my card every year by presenting myself in person with proof of address, I can set up a recurring task to keep track of this and tag it with the geographic co-ordinates of my home town. However, if I live in another city and only return to my home town at long intervals, it’s not useful to me to see this task as being among my “Available” items as I won’t be able to take care of it until I return to my home town.

A good solution to this would have to take account of also having task items that are non-location specific and continue to display them in a custom perspective.

Thank you to anyone who can point me in the right direction on this issue!

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Assuming you’re using OmniFocus on iOS, your best bet would be to assign locations to the tags for your various locations (e.g. the public library) and use the built-in Nearby perspective (currently only available on iOS) to view available actions that can be performed in the vicinity of your currently location.

I hope this helps!

Thanks for your input, Tim! I really appreciate it.

I have a feeling I may not have expressed my question very well the first time round, so let me try to clarify…

If I use the “Nearby” perspective, it shows me only actions that are available in my current location and leaves out those that can be done anywhere (e.g., tasks that can be completed online). What I’m interested in is whether there is some way of using the location-specific tags to filter out actions specific to places other than the one I am at right now?

For example, let’s say I have an action “Visit my tailor on Saville Row” tagged with the location London. While I’m in New York, I don’t want to see this among my available actions, as won’t really be available to me as an action to complete until I am next in London. On the other hand, when I am in London looking at my Available items, I want to see this in my lineup and will want to filter out any actions that I would need to be in New York to complete.

You’re very welcome, @fausto.

I don’t think it’s currently possible to create a custom perspective that includes Nearby + Anywhere (i.e. excluding any location-based actions that aren’t nearby). I recommend making this request to the Omni Group (by choosing Contact Omni from the Help menu)

If you were in New York and didn’t want to see your London actions, you could put your London tag on hold, causing any projects/actions that contain this tag to become unavailable. You would need to make sure you change the status of this tag to Active when you arrive in London.

You could use a location-based triggers in the Reminders app to remind you to make a tag active when you arrive in a location and another to put the tag back on hold as you leave. If you wanted to get fancy, you could include a link to the OmniFocus tag in the notes field of the Reminder to make this as convenient as possible. It’s a little convoluted, but it should do the job.

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