Continuing the discussion from Deferred task with no due date:
I’ve been playing with perspective settings in Omnifocus 2 for IOS to solve this same problem. Am I missing something or do deferred tasks still disappear from Forecast when the defer date is in the past?
That is correct, deferred items will disappear from Forecast view once their date has past.
For this very reason I have created a Deferred perpective to see past and upcoming actions.
Thanks. I did the same and was shocked at how many very old and ‘overdue’ deferred tasks that I had. It will take me a few days to clean them all up.
Progress, right?
I also find this annoying. I want to use defer dates as a tickler / reminder system. I would expect an option in Forecast View that reads “accumulate deferred actions” that makes it so deferred actions pile up in the “Past” date. It would fit so nicely in Forecast View that seems to be the date-related command-center for all upcoming due, past due, upcoming deferred, and calendar events. It’s just missing past deferred.
Please email support@omnigroup.com and vote for this feature.
I already did that, and I created an annual reminder ( with a due date! ) to request the feature. Let’s hope that the feature is implemented as I did give the defer until feature an honest try. I found that I don’t pay attention to the dedicated view deferred items because I am too busy to look at more than 1-2 perspectives , some days I don’t get to look at Omnifocus at all. Yes , it gets that bad when you working fulltime with on-call duties, running your own business, and studying new DevOps technologies ( Puppet, AWS , Asgard , Eureka, Spinnaker.io, Cassandra etc, ) at the same time.
When I get this busy, I need something that pokes me with a big stick when a task ( deferred or not ) comes due.
That’s exactly it: I want OmniFocus to notify me in the event I get busy with life and don’t look at it for a few days. Due tasks are obvious, but not deferred/ticklers.
This is something that I think is missing from the Forecast view. It’s all too easy for a deferred task to slip off the radar and get missed.
I’ve emailed support to add my vote.
I also have things fall through the cracks and miss defer dates. But that’s what a daily review is for. In the morning, I look at the forecast perspective and see my deferred items. This tells me when something should start or become available to me in my perspectives that show available actions. I know I’ll miss some deferred actions. But I can easily catch them in the review perspective when I do the daily review. I have projects with different review cycles ranging from every day, every 3 days, every 7 days, every 14 days, every month or more.
I get “notified” by OmniFocus when my projects show up in the review perspective. If I have OmniFocus notify me with a notification/alarm, I’ll probably end up deferring things much like hitting the snooze button on my desk clock. I’ll just ignore it.
Having a daily review is an important workflow that is much better than snoozing/deferring tasks into the future.
That’s great when you have time for it. I’m lucky if I have time for a weekly review. Actually, it’s been over a month since I’ve had time since I related and started a new job across the country.
After I get up to speed on the new job and find a permanent home, I can probably start doing weekly reviews, but daily reviews will never happen. That’s why I need the application to do the work so that I can focus on completing tasks instead of managing them.
I don’t think I’ve had to do a weekly review in a long time. I will do a quarterly review (every 3 months) just to check on the overall state of condition.
But my daily reviews will be very short. It can range anywhere from having 0 projects to review to 12 projects to review. The average time I’ve spent on a daily review using the review perspective is about 5 minutes. I’ll rarely go past the 15 minute mark.
The weekly review (or quarterly review for my case) requires up to 2-3 hours to work on. So I’ll never do a weekly review unless I feel like my life is totally out of control.
Breaking the review cycle into daily reviews of 5-15 minutes is an easier way for me to digest it. Technology/software can’t be used to babysit us all the time. We still have to put in the work to manage it. Five to fifteen minute daily reviews is an easier way to handle these reviews.
If you can’t do a weekly review, try out the daily review. Not all of the OmniFocus projects needs to be reviewed daily. Most of my active projects and Single Action Lists are set to a weekly review. I stagger them out over the week. All of my someday/maybe/on hold projects are set to be reviewed monthly. I’ll never get to them but I know I’ll eventually be reminded of them on a monthly basis.
On hold projects that will be worked on in the far future will be set to be reviewed once every 3 months.
Changing the review cycles of active and on hold projects helps to ease the pain of the review perspective. The review perspective is our “alarm” or tickler.
You can handle a daily review of 5-15 minutes. I’m sure you can. Do it while eating breakfast or dinner. Reviewing will give you a better sense of control and awareness of your various projects. You will always be notified about a project status whenever it shows up in the review perspective.
As great as applications are, it can’t do everything. There are some things that will still be left up to you.
This discussion Reached an impasse. If someone doesn’t have 15 minutes a week for a review, then they don’t have 7x15 = 105 minutes a week for a daily review.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see different perspectives since there are so many different life situations and priorities out there. And people have time for reviews, some do not. The app developers decided that they they want the app to accommodate only one of them.
Feel free to reply but I’ve added all that I have to say to the discussion.
@ikomrad I see the situation very similar to you in your previous comments. I was deeply missing a “collect past deferred tasks” option, too, but now I’m not. I wanted to share how I’m finally making this work, and what parts I actually find to work better than Forecast view.
This turned into an embarrassingly long post to explain something simple. TLDR: Make two perspectives: one sorted by due date, one sorted by defer date. Contrary to my expectation, it worked even better than Forecast View when I stopped thinking about it and actually tried it.
My situation: I use OF to run my personal life and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. I’m drained and left without much time after work. I use a different system at work.
What I wanted out of OF: A tickler system. Alert me of due/overdue items; alert me of deferred/past-deffer items. Even if I forget to check it some days / weeks. I also use it for proactive planning and discretionary projects, but that’s another topic.
I am too busy to look at more than 1-2 perspectives , some days I don’t get to look at Omnifocus at all.
Sometimes I have those days and weeks, too, and this system handles them well.
Originally I thought this would be too annoying with two separate perspectives to check, but it’s actually working out well and has other strengths:
Now, every morning when I get up, while I’m still in bed, I just open those two perspectives, and flag anything urgent. It takes about 60 seconds. That’s it. (I can do more planning if I want, but this is the minimum amount I am required to do to make sure nothing slips by) Yes, it’s two perspectives I have to open, but I found I can accomplish this in under 60 seconds. That’s my minimal daily review I need to feel confidence I’m on top of everything.
And what if I don’t have enough energy or there’s too much resistance for a few days? Everything will be there waiting for me the next time, and I would have gotten notified of important (ie. Due Soon) tasks by the OF badge icon (I assume I will at least turn on my phone every day).
I’ve been doing this for a month, sometimes daily, sometimes once a week. Here’s what I found:
Flight 16, Excellent solution!
I find this to be a brilliant solution and after reading spent an hour last night modifying my review cycles based on urgency. One feature that would help would be an auto review. In theory this would shorten the review cycles as due dates approach! I have tried and failed miserably to do weekly reviews. I’m hopeful this quick daily review will help!
Yup. Of course this review cycle won’t do anything for projects without deadlines or start dates, but thats the point: Find the stuff you absolutely have to focus on so you can still feel in control even for those days or weeks you don’t have time or energy for a full review. Everything else can wait a few days.
