Focus on IOS iPhone

Hi @eddtr1,

If your evening perspective doesn’t use project hierarchy, you could select one or more contexts in the Context Selection portion of the perspective settings on iOS (the equivalent setting is called Sidebar Selection on the Mac).

Thanks everyone for your responses. Ill test some out and get back to you.

Yes it is possible…

I TOTALLY get it! I was wishing for this yesterday.

I’ve created a perspective for a job that I have, CHPC, and when I click on it it then lists the tasks in a simple order based off of due date and flagged. GREAT! Clean and simple and not a lot of friction involved, just what OF is supposed to do for me.

On the left (Mac) are my contexts and I can simply click one (say ‘iOS’ or ‘errand’) and it filters my lists. EASY! BAM! Look how productive I’m being!

But on the iOS device I click on this same perspective and it lists all my tasks, again, clean and simple, but there is not way to click on a context to filter.

I COULD go into edit perspectives here, select a context to focus on, but I don’t want to edit my perspective. What if I forget to change it back? I’ll have to undo this step eventually, so it is really 2 steps every time. Plus the buttons to do so aren’t prominent, you have to scroll down to get to it. All in all it is a LOAD of friction! I was being productive but now just got knocked off the horse and SQUIRREL!

I get it… I would LOVE to see a context button.

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This lack of focus, having to create one of too many perspectives, is a huge drawback for OF on iOS. Either work in projects view, contexts view, or create a perspective of mixing the two. Of course you can’t create a context based perspective for iOS. If you have multiple jobs and styles of work (a plethora of contexts) you can really clutter up your system with a lot of perspectives. What was once a clean sidebar now becomes the endless list of perspective icons. Wait… Which icon is the one that I wanted? On the Mac you can just go to project and focus, but you can’t do this on iOS. So hence the crazy perspectives list.

What was once a great strength of OF has become its crutch.

… How is it so?

PLease add another one

Does anyone has workaround for Focus on iPad for a Folder in the Review tab? (So I want to be able to only see the selected folder in the review tab.)

I would also like to see this feature, would make things simpler beeing able to focus on each life area when needed instead of creating muliple perspectives.

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Totally would love this as well but not able to find out how to do it. Allows you to segment your review which when your pushed for time is a great benefit - well looks like I need to wait till I get to a Mac :(

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+1 this feature request. Focus mode is a big deal for OmniFocus on Mac, not having it on iOS is kind of a big gap.

Dear OF Team. 4 Years since this thread started and this vital feature is still missing on IOS.

Please bring it to IOS soon.

Don’t want to be rude, but i’ve been following the forum/discourse since the beginning and i kind of get the feeling omni guys are not focusing on the requested features or making the product really powerful but on things they think/feel will bring in more money. It’s sad actually. For instance support for folders has been added which makes it nice to group projects, but the lack of focus mode on those folders doesn’t allow you to review separate groups of projects individually. But sure, let’s bring native ios browser in instead because that is more important. Would like to see how many user requests they had for native ios browser that it needed to be implemented before focus on ios.
The lack of user requests not being made public tells me they are not serious about handling user requests/priorities first.

I still need this feature alot, the lack of it is basicly forcing me to move my work and client tasks into another system which I dont want to do.

I use perspective to focus, what’s so important about Focus according to you?

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The perspective options scales badly for multiple life ares (like was said earlier in this threat). In my case my life areas are personal, Job, client work, artist work.

And I would like to be able to focus on each area and then use my perspectives (see list below). I don´t use Perspectives to focus on life areas becaus then I would need to creat multiple perspectives.

Theese are the perspectives that are in my sidebar on my Mac and I use focus to work with them.

Perspectives
Flagged Project View = This sprints actions in a project view

  • Then most of the tags belowe are in “Tag/Context View”
    Priority Matrix = MIT( Most Important Task), Frog (Eat you´re frog), Urgent, Important
    Mac Flagged = Everything that is flagged and I has a mac tag
    IOS Flagged = Everything I do on IOS devices
    Errands Flagged = Everything I don´t do on my mac or Apple devices
    Waiting for = …
    Today = Today tag
    Tomorrow = Deffered actions that have today tag
    Forecast = …
    Deffered = Deffered Tasks
    Future (on hold) = Tasks I don´t put deffer date on but will do, it has theese subtags : soon, later or someday maybe
    Due = Everything that has a due date

I don´t want to creat one of those for each area

  • today work
  • today personal
  • sprint work
  • sprint personal

You see where I´m gonig with this.

So having the optoin to focus on IOS would make it alot easier.

Well, I think our systems differ very much as I use way less tags. To think of it, my only functional tag for viewing purposes is a today tag. That’s it.

I don’t mean to insult you, but have you ever considered simplifying your system?

I don´t use Perspectives to focus on life areas becaus then I would need to creat multiple perspectives.

AFAIK you can create an endless number of perspectives. But with (much) less tags, wouldn’t that be an acceptable number?

2 Likes

In the meantime, since you have only a small number (4) of areas you would like to ‘focus’ on, I suggest the following approach.

In the important perspectives which you would like to use with these areas on iOS, create filter rules for each of these folders/projects, and put them at the top of the list of rules. During use of these perspectives, enable/disable the rules as needed.

As an example, below, I created rules for two areas ‘Home’ and ‘Work’. Initially both will be disabled. When you are in the perspective and you want to ‘focus’ on one of the areas, you tap on the icon to edit the perspective and swipe left on the rule to reveal the ‘enable’ command. Later you can disable it to remove the filter or enable a different focus area.

The enable/disable command on a perspective rule corresponds to the checkbox next to the rule in OF3 for Mac.

Once these rules are set up, applying them is probably a few more taps than a native ‘Focus’ mode on iOS would be, but it’s still manageable when you feel the need to filter on an area.

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I have written a plugin for just this reason - it puts an entire folder structure on hold and re-enables it.

This plugin allows all the projects in a folder to be put on hold or re-activated, toggling from one state to the other. You might, for example want to deactivate a Work folder on a Friday night and reactivate it on a Monday morning.

The plugin will descend into the selected folder structure changing active projects to on-hold and vice versa.

Note: a HIDDEN/DEACTIVATED tag is added to active projects when they are put on hold and removed when they are reactivated. This is so the plug can identify which projects to re-activate by only re-activating ones that it de-activated in the first place. This means that projects that were on-hold when their enclosing folder was de-activated remain on-hold when the folder is reactivated.

Actions are provided to activate or put on hold the selected folder or to present a choice from the list of all folders.

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Great, haven’t installed it yet, but how does it trigger? By time, manually or something other?

E.g. could changing a task title to let’s say “focus work ON” in a folder called “FocusTrigger” or something like that, activate the plugin from iOS and have it perform it’s magic?

That does require a running version of OmniFocus on macOS of course and the plugin activating at certain time intervals.