Dating difficulties. (Pun)

[Singinghound]

I have been struggling with the way OF handles dates.

In my workflow, I tag tasks and projects with time period windows:
‘Next’ is anything that I want to do within the current review period, which is typically within 1-2 weeks
‘4 Weeks’ is anything that I want to do this month
‘3 Months’ is this quarter,
‘12 Months’ is the year.

In OF, anything outside ‘Next’ is switched to ‘On Hold’ in the Tags menu.

In my review process, I’ll cascade tasks from one chronological category to another, and ideally I’d apply due dates only to those items which MUST be complete on a certain day.

I would really like to then apply an action date to help me plan when I want to actually do a task. Defer dates simply hide tasks until their nominated date and I have never satisfactorily implemented them.

For the past 10 days I have been trying Things 3, which handles dates in a different way. It has deadlines, and it has ‘do’ days. I really appreciate this approach. (I’m less convinced by the ‘someday’ ‘anytime’ categories at this stage.)

I’m curious to know whether anyone has set up OF so that Defer dates actually indicate a start/do date, rather than ‘start no sooner than’.

[ryanjamurphy]

I have long dreamed of Do dates. I have thought about using Defer dates in this way, but it is really an abuse of that feature.

[psidnell]

It’s funny, I tried Things, and it really disliked their approach to dates (after using OF).

For “do” dates I give the task a flag (or Today tag) and give it a defer of my do date.

That way it pops into my world on the do date and the due date can be the real deadline.

The only downside is that it doesn’t appear as available before the do date (in case you wanted to do it early) - but you can create a “Do” perspective to show such deferred tasks (remaining + has defer date + any of due/flagged/today, sort by defer)

I like the idea of a do date but having 3 dates + notifications to wrangle might be unfriendly to new users.