Flagged in Forecast?

I love the omnifocus forecast view. I Imagine using it as my dashboard as I love a single pane of glass throughout the day to show me my meeting and tasks. What is the rationale behind nor having An option for flagged tasks to be shown? Any workarounds? Would be nice perhaps to be able to specify a perspective to have in forecast.

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The forecast is meant to show only projects/tasks that have a defer date or due date.

I substitute the Forecast perspective with a “Today” custom perspective and use that as my “dashboard”.

sure

Currently, I have it grouped by contexts and sorted by due dates. This perspective shows all due or flagged tasks. You can change the perspective to suit your needs. Perhaps you can have it grouped by due date and then sorted by something else.

The only time i really look at the Forecast perspective is just to see my schedule and to see how many date-sensitive tasks pop up there. I might see deferred things for today or in the next few days. Or I might see due tasks that show up today or in the next few days.

Otherwise, I would rather be working in my “Today” custom perspective.

HTH

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Same here, with 2 minor differences:

  1. mine is called M.I.T. (for most important tasks)

    • important to me, as it avoids me postponing tasks just for the sake of doing it (in case I can’t do it today, I don’t feel bad eventually leaving some of them there for the next day)
  2. I always look at the Forecast perspective in two situations:

    • at the start of the day, to see my due tasks (my forecast only show due)
    • whenever I’m out and about and I have a badge on OmniFocus on my iOS devices (hate badges, therefore always try to work on the due tasks 1st, so… I don’t… have… badges!. Yes. Hate them.)

;-)

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Wow… I like that perspective name: m.i.t.

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I’m super happy this topic is still around. It looks like in 2019, it’s possible to have a single tag show up in forecast, but not the flagged status: OF3 makes me question my use of Flagged. I think it would be awesome and trivial to just add the ability to show flagged items and a tag in forecast. I think it’s worth resurrecting this thread to say that it would still be awesome, and the fact that a tag got in before flags is just kind of sad to me.

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Hi Shank,

You need to contact Omni support and ask them if they’d consider adding an option to show flagged tasks in Forecast. They may not see this topic.

I like the use of a Tag rather than flagged tasks in forecast as you can then use them for different uses. Many folks don’t use the flag for their most important tasks.

E.g. I flag things temporarily before certain meetings to ensure I cover everything I need to at that meeting. (This is for non regular meetings which have tags)

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I know that. But community support does help in times like this.

I understand this – the problem is that if I flag something, it’s probably really important and needs to be in all the views. There’s also no dedicated button to assign a specific tag anywhere, iirc.

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There are built-in commands for assigning your ‘Today’ tag (the one selected in the Forecast view options) to an action: ‘Add Tag “xxx”’ in the right-click menu on macOS, and an icon when you swipe to the right in iOS. This makes it (almost) as convenient as flagging to select/deselect actions that will appear in the Forecast view.

I recall that Ken Case @kcase made a casual comment after the release of OF3 that it would be valuable to enable all the custom perspective settings to be used in the Forecast view. This would indeed be the ideal solution, to select exactly the set of actions that you want to include in the Forecast presentation (some people want to include just flagged items but other people might want different criteria). Maybe we will see this enhancement in a future product version.

In the meantime, I recommend adapting your workflow conventions to the app’s features: flags for a certain type of shortlist of actions, and the Today tag for the set of actions to be done in the very short term.

I use flags to mark a manageable set of tasks to do in the short-term in priority (eg. less than 20 actions within the next week or two), and those that require some sort of attention. I then toggle the Today tag on/off on some of them to manage each day. So my ‘Today’ actions are always a subset of my ‘Flagged’ shortlist — I never have actions tagged ‘Today’ that are not also flagged. This fits well with the fact that the flagged status is inherited by child actions: I often flag a whole group of actions (representing an intermediate outcome) or a whole project for my shortlist, and then pick a specific one to do today.

This is definitely heading in the right direction. Thanks for pointing it out! It actually ties a keyboard shortcut to it too, which is what I would want from that feature.

I definitely agree that the best way is to make Forecast support all custom perspective settings.

I appreciate the thought you’ve put into this workflow, but it really doesn’t have a use for me. Adding a “this is important” marker simply isn’t very useful to me. I can’t think of literally any other part of the app that doesn’t support flagging as a first class feature except the forecast view, save for the fact that you can always flag items from forecast view.

I totally get you. I know this flow works for you, and I’m really happy it does! I’ll definitely consider it more because adding and removing the forecast tag via keyboard shortcut is leaps and bounds ahead of the usability I originally thought it had.

On a more fundamental level, though, I kind of disagree. The problem is that OmniFocus doesn’t have set conventions for “today,” and “flag” is abstract. I think in the ideal world, flags would just be tags, and tags could have little icons/buttons that would enable you to use them throughout the UI as equals. Right now, flags are more of a carryover from the context days. The result of that is a weird set of feature discrepancies exists between the two. The big selling point of OmniFocus is that it’s flexible and adapts to whatever works best for the user. Drawing the line at “you must use tagging for the forecast view and flags for anything but that” seems very OmniFocus 2 to me, and antithetical to that idea.

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Exactly. And the flagged items are nicely highlighted-- so they pop out visually from everything else. Currently, there is no way to visually highlight items with the “today” tag. So if I’m scanning through different perspectives, the today items do not necessarily pop out. (unless I also flag them, which seems redundant)

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Please, OmniGroup, give us the option for “Flagged” to mean “Today” in the context of the Forecast perspective!

I suggest, like others, send the request directly to support. omnifocus@omnigroup.com is the email address I use. I just happen to send in a similar request this morning. I requested a custom perspective for the forecast rather than just flagged. This way we can customize it to the way each of us work. If you only want flagged than you can just do that and if you want something more complex the logic is there like the other perspectives.

On iOS at least both flagged and the Today tag (if configured) are available by swiping right on a task. This does at least make it convenient to use the tag (even if you’d rather use the flag).

Unfortunately the flag is more than just a “special” tag. if you add a tag to a project it’s just on the project and only new tasks inherit it - but if you flag a project then everything beneath it is flagged immediately, so I get why people want this…

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I never knew this, thanks @psidnell

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