In the OF manual on the second page of the Contexts section, it’s explained that when a project has a context assigned, any new actions will receive that same context by default.
Is there a way to disable this behavior of auto-assigning the project’s context to its actions?
My use-case is a context called “Lists”, where each list is a project with that context assigned. The actions within those lists/projects would never have the “Lists” context; instead, they would have a context like “Chores” and “Grocery Store.”
I’m kind of an OF noob, so if there’s a better way to handle this use-case, I’m open to suggestions.
If you don’t assign a context to the project itself, or if you delete the context assigned to the project, the action items will have no context assigned by default.
If you need more granular control within a project, you can create action groups:
Example:
Project with context: Office
Random Action loose in project (context of Office by default).
Action Group Item (context of Boss)
- Item added using “Add Inside” will now take on context of Boss by default.
Action Group Item (context of Customer)
- Item added using “Add Inside” or added afterwards at this level will take on context Customer).
To summarize, you can use the hierarchy to control the default context to some extent. I hope this gives you a few options to try. The “Organize” menu has most of what you need to set up the hierarchy as desired on the Mac, including your keyboard shortcuts.
Hope this helps!
Thanks for responding. The way I decided to approach it was to remove the project assignment from all of the items since they’re “loose” items that typically don’t belong to a project. Instead, I created a “Lists” context with several nested contexts for each type of list I need to maintain. This has the added benefit of being able to assign an item within a list to a project when it makes sense.
The whole refactoring took about three minutes - really loving the flexibility of OF.
Cool! It is great fun to hear about some of the innovative ways OmniFocus users have applied and customized the features. I’m glad you found a working combination. Thanks for sharing what worked for you.
