I want to suggest the possibility of a user option to not list actions twice in the Forecast view that have both a deferred and due date. When I view my deferred tasks in that view, I’m looking for only tasks which are not due that day in the Deferred area, do not want to constantly filter out in my mind those which are both due and have a deferred date when scanning the list.
Have emailed support with the request, wanted other users to weigh in with their thoughts.
I was about to post about this, and wondering if it was a feature and not a bug.
If showing items twice under Forecast view is a feature, I don’t understand the use for it. I would like to learn if anyone found it useful, and in what way they did so. To me, it certainly makes the list look messy, cluttered with unnecessary repetition.
Yes, I can see no rationale for it. If you have an item that is due that day, you’re not concerned with it also starting that day, the only concern would be due today items who are not yet available, but the color highlighting shows this context. Hopefully an option could be implemented, something along the lines of ‘Show duplicated items under both Due and Deferred’, within the view settings for Forecast.
The “workaround” is coming right on the heels of @omnifocususer’s post: if something is Due, don’t defer it to exact the same date. Generally, either deferring or marking due best case leads to less due items and more defers. If it is unlikely that the task will be finished on the date it was deferred to, consider deferring +flagging. Thereby, the flagged task only becomes actionable and visible on the deferred date, but remaining on the flagged list until finished.
I second this redundancy. The overview would be much clearer if the duplicated tasks were just displayed as one task with both the deferred date and due date shown. This comes down to the tabs ‘Due’ and ‘Deferred’ in the Forecast view… My suggestion is to have the ability to simply show the tasks present on a certain day (without the tabs) due to either it being ‘due’ on that day or due it being ‘deferred’ to that day (sorry about al the due’s). Another suggestion is to allow some more versatility in the forecast view and make a tick box with ‘show due items’ just like the one present for deferred items.
About that “workaround”: this would clear the redundancy, but I have certain repeating tasks in my Forecast view which of course have a defer date and a due date on the same day (so it can be repeated on the next) which this method does not apply to.
I’m loving the new version, I just set up my whole OmniFocus, everything is in place, except for the clutter in the Forecast view! Would love to hear back.
I discovered this issue when I used the “defer +1 day” option to suppress and filter out tasks from showing in my “Today” perspective which I specifically created to only show tasks due today(i.e. within 24 hours).
Of course, that meant when I looked at the Forecast perspective for the next day, these tasks show up twice - once in the Due section and the other in the Deferred section.
I certainly can’t find any use for this repetition and would love for OF to find a way to remove it.
Right now my method of workaround is to simply not view deferred items, and complete anything due first. Then look at non-due deferred items which are the only remaining. This is far from ideal. The due dates need arbitrary deferred dates, otherwise they would show up in the previous day’s due soon, and for deferred dates that can’t actually be done until a certain time - deferred dates are still necessary. Hopefully Omni will chime in on this, my initial email to support received no response.
+1 from me for this enhancement
Well, from a principled perspective, this is good. However, from a practical perspective, when an action really cannot be started until Today (say at 6am) and is also due Today (say 6pm), then your proposed method falls apart.
One alternative might be to create a sequential action group and place a deferred task BEFORE the one that is due. The deferred task would state why the due task cannot be started until the given time. An example is …
Revise Proposal (sequential action group)
You can play around with variations of what is/is not flagged or deferred in this setup until the Forecast view shows what you can understand within reason (as opposed to showing exactly what you want, which by comparison may require waiting forever on OG). At a minimum with this, you should be able to make some adjustments to show two different tasks in the Forecast view rather than two of the same tasks.
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JJW
I totally agree - this is an area where OF is falling behind in the competition. But at the same time the underlying structure related to these superficially-seeming problems appears to be complex (appears because I would not understand anything of this).
The fact that Forecast only looks at the date creates another problem for those that have items that only differ in time. Something you cannot start before lunch but has to be done before the end of the working day. Since you can set a date and time (up to a minute) for both defer and due I consider this behaviour to be a bug. Either give us the precision of defining things up to the minute or don’t give us the option to insert time.
As it is now, the name “Forecast” is simply misleading. It should have been called “Due” because that’s what it actually is: a view that shows your due items next to your calendar. If you want an overview you now need more than 1 perspective to do so. I wish I could just use 1.
I still see that there’s no option as of yet to not list items twice with both start and due dates occurring that day. If other users are still having issues with this, please chime in.
Also a link to this similar thread:
The redundancy in the Forecast view is dumb. And I don’t want yet another “work-around.”
In order to keep things straight (and my mind like water, or as close as I can get) I’m going to need to make a list in OmniFocus of all of my work-arounds. I guess “work-around” could be a new context for me.
Hate to revive such an old topic, but as this matter hasn’t seen improvement, I think it’s still relevant. Omni team–can this please be revisited? It creates so much friction in the Forecast to show an item up to 3 different times if they have defer dates, due dates, and the tag that happens to be the Forecast tag. There are reasons why some of my tasks may require all three (custom perspectives drive the tag usage), but mostly I have many tasks with the same defer/due date. I cannot start these items earlier than their due date.
Could logic like this be implemented?
This would help me immensely and would enable me to get a ton of use of the forecast perspective. As it stands, my forecast perspective is a cluttered mess because of my defer/due/tag needs and I don’t use it. See the below example…I doubt anyone gets value out of seeing the same item 3 times inn any perspective, and it only gets worse in real world situations where I can see the same 20 tasks 3 times.
