I’ve been watching some “Learn Omnifocus” videos and I’ve seen two different styles for users with a “Daily” project. These projects are often tailored to morning or evening activities, and will be completed in full before reappearing the next day.
In some of these videos, it looks like the user as a “Daily Activities” project, and the individual actions repeat every day. But in other videos, the user sets the project itself to repeat every day.
Is there a notable advantage or disadvantage to each approach?
Hi there! One of the major differences is that a repeating project will only spawn the next instance of all its children when the project itself is marked complete. So if you skip one of your daily chores, the chores you did complete won’t appear until the project is marked complete.
If the individual items are repeating, each action appears tomorrow immediately after you mark it complete. Because of this, I generally set daily repeats on individual actions.
Repeating projects are typically used for multi-step processes where the entire project needs to repeat on a fixed interval.
I use repeating daily projects for things that are important that I do each day. I purposely keep these short and focused, and items are flagged so that they appear on my “Hot List” (what some people call “Today”).
Here’s my repeating “Perform Morning Review” project (takes about 5-10 minutes):
If there are things that I would like to do each day but aren’t mission critical, I add them to a single action list called “[Maintenance]” (side note: I put them names of single action lists in square brackets to make them visually distinct from parallel/sequential projects). An example of an action that would go on this list is “Process: Junk Mail folders”.
