I’m trying to create a task for a monthly repeating prescription that I have to call to get refilled. Ideally I’d like a 30 day deferred sequential task ‘Get Prescription’ that has a couple of sub-tasks.
The first task should be a reminder to call the pharmacy asking for the refill which ideally should appear a couple of days before the overall due date and remind me daily until done.
The second subtask would then be a location based task to ‘Pick Up Prescription’ when I’m near the local pharmacy.
I have the location task set, but it’s the tickler reminder within the overall sequential task that I’m unsure how to achieve?
TIA
Unsure if you can do exactly that in OF, but I tend to use flags for this purpose. I have a “Morning Review” project (set to repeat every day) that makes me (for example) check all my inboxes, review available tasks, and flag stuff as “to do” for the day. YMMV depending on whether you can guarantee quarter of an hour to yourself every morning.
If you’re already using flags for something else, you could always add a quick note (something like “#tickler”) to the task, and then create a custom perspective to focus on just those tasks.
I would probably set the call action to be deferred until the 23rd of the month, and to accomodate for preparation time and the weekend, set a due date of 13:00 on the 27th (in the case of May).
It would then show up on the 23rd in your Forecast perspective, where most people would flag it as something to be done on the day, similar to what @jyr said. I would probably flag it in advance so I would be certain not to miss it.
I would then see it in my notification centre widget, which shows a custom perspective of due soon, overdue and flagged actions. Without using a custom perspective, you could achieve much the same simply by adjusting the settings for the Today widget in settings. The flagged actions there persist across days.
As for alerts on the defer date, the best you could get is if you pre-set the action as flagged, then add flagged items to the badge icon count or, on the Mac, enable a notification for flagged items. And of course, you’ll get an alert at the due date and time on iOS. But that’s the most you’ll get. OmniFocus requires you play a rather active part of the system.
