Custom status / group by tag

Hi all,

For a long time I’ve been using Notion for my task management and am considering switching to omnifocus.

The one things that I can’t seem to wrap my head around is using tags for various types of “task metadata”.

One example is that of a custom status. In notion I have several task statuses, such as “Now”, “Next”, “Later”, “Waiting for”, “Someday maybe”. I’ve seen that I can add these as tags in OF, however within a project I cans seem to sort or group the tasks based on this set of tags.

I tried creating a custom perspective for the above and it worked to a degree, until other tags get added such as people. What would really help for my use case would be custom statuses or another field in addition to tags.

Have any of you run into the same issues or even better have some workarounds?

I’m not sure I get what you mean? A tag can indicate a “custom status”, but I’m not sure why you would want that?

The tags developed out of the “old” contexts in GTD, to indicate what is needed or where you need to be to perform the task. Over time people wanted to add more options, and that resulted in the addition of tags.

From your description I think you’ve got issues with sorting (by tag) rather than the perspective filters? (duplication of the tasks in the view?) Or am I missing something?

Hi @Janov,

Perhaps a screenshot of my current setup will aid in my description.

The screenshot shows a list of tasks for a particular project. As you can see there is a “status” field which all the tasks are sorted by and next to that another field for related people. This allows me to easily see within each project what I should be working on now, what’s up next etc. incl. someday / maybes.

Other than sorting here, I use the “status” for filtering all my actions across all projects. So answering the question of “Show me all “now actions” across all projects” - this is pretty easy to do within OF.

So my question really is how to set this up in OF?

I tried setting up my status as a set of tags and this works to a degree. The problem comes when sorting and grouping tasks by tag. Here, ideally I want to sort tasks based on only this tag group as opposed to all the tags (which would incl. people).

I hope that that helps clear up what I’m trying to achieve / replicate.

This enhancement (grouping actions based on a predefined set of tags, instead of all the tags applied to the actions) is something that many users have asked for, and Ken Case acknowledged in the past would be useful. We know that Omni is working on a major new release of OF — best to wait and see what improvements that will offer.

In the meantime I suggest trying the ‘Tags (Combined)’ grouping option. That will reduce the ‘noise’ of many tag groups, since an action will only be present once in the entire perspective.

Thanks for the info. As a brand new user I didn’t know of the upcoming update. Do you have any kind of ETA?

If I had to guess based on the speed of these things in the past, 50/50 this year, dropping if lots of shiny MacOS/iOS features get announced at WWDC in June. This could be quite optimistic as changes now have to be made across 3 platforms.

You could add the persons name to the task title ie do this with xyz or “do this thing (xyz, abc)”

I tend to do this with support tasks which tend to be short lived and closed off quickly. Not ideal but it does add context to tasks as to who they relate to.

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