Use case: I have 5 things I want “due” tomorrow, but only 1 that I want a reminder for at 10am.
To achieve this in Reminders is super simple: disable alerts for all day events, and enable for timed events. Then simply add:
thing one - tomorrow
thing two - tomorrow
thing 3 at 10am tomorrow
etc
All events will appear on my “today” list (tomorrow), but only the 10am event will send a notif.
Omni gives every task a time by default, so I turned off “notify when due”, because I hate seeing 5 things pop up at 8am or whatever default time.
So I now have to add a “custom” notif to the 10am task (since due alerts are disabled). First I set the task as due at 10am, then go into the custom notif picker and pick “one minute before”. It’s quite a few extra steps, and AFAIK not possible from the desktop quick-add.
It’s enough extra steps that I just don’t use OF for timed alerts, instead choosing Reminders.
OF doesn’t offer much of a calendar interface (like TickTick for example), so I’m time-blocking and “calendaring” in other apps, and it’s also not the easiest for “remind me to do this at specific time tomorrow”, making it the third wheel in a system that should have two at most.
Power users, do you use notifications in OF? How do you deal with unwanted notifs for “due any time today” tasks?
My default due time is the end of my nominal working day, which I rather arbitrarily set to 5 pm. (As an academic, much of my work is largely self scheduled.)
If something is due sooner, I change the due time so I get a notification sooner. Usually I give myself a little wiggle room, because if something is truly due at 12 noon and will not be accepted after that, I will set the OF due time to 11 so that I’m not caught short.
With my system, I do sometimes get notifications at 5 pm that several tasks are due. But I try to avoid that by using due dates as much as possible only for things that are truly due on a given day—i.e., where I’ve promised someone other than myself that they will be done by then. I try otherwise to use my Forecast tag and flags to indicate things that I want to get done soon but that don’t involve a promise to someone or a hard deadline.
I do find the Forecast perspective helpful in getting a sense of how my due tasks interact with my calendar, in particular if a due time falls during a meeting.
Testing with OmniFocus 4 has opened my eyes again to the power of flags again and the benefit of seeing flags in Forecast. For the last year or so, I’ve relied on the default scheduler to remind me of all my work at 6 AM. A visual of Flags in Forecast will be super helpful for me.
