I’ve been using OmniFocus for a long time now, and I like to take some time each week to set up my upcoming week. A lot of my tasks are repeating tasks, for instance, I might have blog-specific tasks on Tuesday and Thursday. However, repeating tasks only show up in due lists and in the Forecast view the first time they are due, which makes planning out my full week in advance a royal pain! Using my Tuesday/Thursday example, my Forecast calendar would show a few tasks coming up on Tuesday and Thursday would look wide open, when in actuality, my Thursday is pretty packed. With a lot of tasks to do, and several repeating ones, the Forecast view, which should and could be an awesome task scheduling tool, becomes unreliable for seeing what I actually have going on at a glance.
Is there some way that I’ve been missing to be able to see my task schedule for what it really is, for example, a Tuesday/Thursday task, rather than a Tuesday task and an if-I-check-it-off-on-Tuedsay-then-Thursday task? Does that make sense to anyone else?
I guess it makes perfect sense the way you explain it but at this moment it is not possible.
The forecast view shows you the current content of Omnifocus, and this includes only the Tuesday tasks as the Thursday tasks have not been created yet; they will be created by Omnifocus as soon as you finish the Tuesday tasks.
You could create two separate actions, one that repeats every Tuesday, and another that repeats every Thursday. At this point, there’s no way to have the next repeat of an action exist before this one’s completed.
Have to repeat my post from another similar topic:
“I prefer to have an adjustable settings - for instance, a checkbox “Show repeating tasks in Forecast”.
I use Forecast to estimate my future workload - and how can I do it without tasks which are scheduled but not displayed???”
Agreed. Forecast currently does not actually show a forecast. I have daily and weekly tasks in my actual schedule and I can’t get them to show up unless I make each a separate task. Very time consuming. Repeating tasks need to be optionally visible even if the latest instance isn’t complete yet.
@lizard, has there been any change on this? I strongly agree with MKV and ildar; the current paradigm with repeating tasks under forecast is a big limitation of OF.
I am not aware of any change to this feature, but I’m also not on the OmniFocus team right now, so may have missed something.
If you look at the “OmniFocus in 2017”, you’ll note that they do have some plans related to repeating actions. So if you haven’t already, now would be a great time to email our support humans (omnifocus@omnigroup.com) with specifics of what you’d like to see.
I am just reading this and I am new to OmniFocus.
I wonder how do you solve the issue of assigning dates and times to tasks if you can’t get a proper forecast.
If I look at my week and I can see all my tasks (including repeated tasks), I can make a good decision when to schedule another task.
But the way OmniFocus works, this is not possible.
Imagine I am planning a bigger tasks which would take me a few hours. It all looks good on the day I planned it, but one day before the actual date my calendar fills up will all the repeated tasks for the following day. That would completely overwhelm me. How do you deal with this?
