Hi Everyone,
This is sort of a re-post of a query I submitted back in February. I’m hoping someone can help because over that period I have not managed to find a suitable solution, to the point where I’m running two task managers just because of this one issue and I really want to just keep everything in OF2.
I have to remember about 60 or 70 birthdays per year. Each one has a repeating task, with a defer date of two weeks beforehand (two weeks to get a card, or figure out a present, or post stuff, or whatever). The due date is the date of the birthday itself. In ‘Things’, there is a function to ‘show in Today’, which enables a task to appear in Today (equivalent to the same space in OF2) with a due date in the future. Despite multiple attempts, I can’t recreate this kind of thing in OF2. ‘Due soon’ is no good, because it only gives me a week and it adds a whole bunch of other tasks to the badge icon that I don’t want or need. Changing ‘view’ to ‘first available’ screws up looking at other projects (and doesn’t auto-remind me of the birthdays). Trying to set up a perspective that shows tasks when they BECOME available doesn’t seem to work, and I don’t want to set the due date to two weeks early as I would end up with either a bunch of overdue tasks or having to change the due date daily, which would be really annoying. Am I missing something? Any help would be massively appreciated.
I make careful use of flags and flagged perspectives to make the birthday thing work for me. I too have a similar number of birthdays to remember! Make a dedicated birthday perspective in projects with weekly review and flag those coming soon! Your Birthday perspective will never let you down again!
Personally tried T3 and I couldn’t handle all the clutter forming in my today view! Nightmare every morning! No such hassle with OF2.
Thanks rosemaryjayne - that almost worked. Do you know of a way to keep the task in ‘today’ after the defer date? It worked for that day (yesterday, when I tested it) but then disappeared today. I think if I could solve that issue then your solution would work, which would be great 👍😆.
Thanks revstu. I couldn’t get your idea to work and I’m not sure why - might be something to do with my ‘due soon’ settings. I have ‘due soon’ set to ‘today’, as I use ‘today’ to see only the things that have to be done today (I have so many things becoming due every day with work and stuff that I can’t afford to expand the size of that list). I tried flagging and then changing the criteria of my ‘birthdays’ perspective, but still nothing shows up in that perspective until the date it is actually due, which goes back to the problem of not being able to set a perspective that shows up tasks which become available. Have I understood you correctly? Are you able to share a bit more detail about the perspective you are using? Your suggestion of regular review is a good one; I’m definitely going to try that as well.
Seems like you’d like to see the same feature as I do (I miss it every day!) and that is - something like Passed Defer in the today view.
Here’s my request - Add Past Defer to Forecast view
Please write to support@omnigroup.com with the same request so this could be more visible.
There is no setting for that. For projects where it’s important I have them in a perspective which is grouped by Defer Date and only tasks which are available are shown.
Hi rosemaryjayne,
That sounds like something that would work for me - how do you achieve it/ what’s your setup for the perspective? The perspective that I created to try to do that is pretty much perpetually blank!
My Today perspective is set like this; Ironically I have a birthday in for today. My due soon is 24 hrs too. (you can change the filter to available if you want a really tightly controlled today list-I mess around with that from time to time but I prefer on balance seeing unavailable items as well so I know what to expect, or if necessary, defer them further if I can’t manage everything today.
The beauty of this perspective is that anything with a due date & flag appears in it. Using review carefully I flag anything coming up within 7 days (hence the name) of importance and it’ll definitely appear in this perspective. This is double insulation for safety. I’ve never missed a birthday, appointment or anything important since I started using Omnifocus and that was in the version 1 days.
I supplement this with an ‘Appointments perspective’ that lets me see everything vital for the next x days/months/years. (I actually have appointments years in advance sometimes due to my ministry). This perspective allows for ‘unflaggged’ items. This is really good for removing anything I flag from this list and it automatically appears in my seven days list.
