I love the Forecast perspective and it’s getting better all the time, but still lags behind how I can customize other perspectives. For example, I can only really use flags and one tag to decide what to show. I can’t make it show items with a defer date in the past. I can’t decide to hide work actions, even though I have a dedicated perspective that shows those things.
Solution: replace the Forecast options with a user-selectable perspective. Create a new perspective that mimics the current options and make it the default option in the Forecasts.
My Forecast is frustratingly close to being the thing that organizes my life. I have a custom perspective that I live in instead, but I have to bounce between it and Forecast to see calendar events. There’s no one view that shows everything.
My solution to a similar problem was to add to the Today perspective any uncompleted item with a Defer date of yesterday. That is trigger enough to deal with it in some fashion, recognising it is left over (having prevented it from being forgotten).
I have also, deliberately redundantly, added a new “Tomorrow” perspective between Today and Forecast. Often I want to check quickly what is immediately coming up rather than looking down the longer view of Forecast.
I have a “Ready” perspective I use in mostly the same way. I do wish it showed calendar events, though. I think “Forecast” is in an odd state where it’s blessed with features you can’t find elsewhere in OF, yet misses some important features from other places in OF.
In my dream world, perspectives would have a “Display as Forecast” checkbox.
The new date-based filter rules for custom perspectives (introduced in OmniFocus 4.2) did help quite a bit with letting people build their own custom Forecast-like perspectives, but as you note they’re still missing a few Forecast features: the ability to include calendar events, and the ability to dynamically filter the list by selecting a date (i.e. showing a calendar in the sidebar the way Forecast does).
I do think those would be worthwhile features to add. Be sure to email the support team at omnifocus@omnigroup.com if this is something you’d like to see!
