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?
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.
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.
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.
Hi MultiDim, I still find this option being to much of an hazle so I don´t thinkI will implement it. Might work well tough for a one or two most used perspective like “Today” for example.
psidnell I´m curious about you´re script, I tried but didn´t get it to work (I havn´t been using apple scripts). Can you point me in any directions that would help me with using you´re script ?
Then install the plugin somewhere with the Files app and finally point OmniFocus at it with the new option/button that appears after the feature is enabled.
When u say Install it in the “Files” app, is it enough to drag it there ? When installing it on the mac I put you´re script in the “Computer scripts Folder” Do I need to refer to the same version of you´re script on mac and IOS ?
This is what I get on IOS no matter what folder I chose (see picture)
Thank you again @psidnell this was exactly what I needed!
Awesome to be able to switch focus like that depending on what time I´m on, in my case mostly “Personal” or “Clients/Job” and still use my perspectives (which work for all life areas) and not having to create multiple copys of them for IOS.
