Getting only Today Tasks in Today Perspective

David Sparks in his Omnifocus Field Guide has a good discussion of the Today perspectives. I’ve mirrored his setup of the Today perspective (see screen shot), but I am also getting deferred items in my Today folder. Can anyone see what I am doing wrong in setting up the Today perspective?

Sparks sets due dates sparingly, and uses defer instead to prioritize tasks that need doing immediately vs. those that don’t need immediate action. I like this work flow, as it is easy to run through all one’s tasks, and defer everything that isn’t due today.

Ideally, the Today view would then show the tasks that are due Today, not the deferred tasks as well.

(PS…Playing around with this, it seems like I can get the Today perspective to only show Today items if I filter by Status, and select Available, rather than Remaining. Is this what others do?)

As you discovered, if you change the “Filter by availability” setting to “Available” you won’t see actions that have been deferred to the future.

The main two perspectives that I use when getting work done are Available (that shows everything that’s available) and Hot List (that shows available actions that are flagged, due or overdue).

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The idea is that you defer what doesn’t start today, meaning doesn’t require your attention. Nothing to do with due date.

If your perspective shows all Remaining tasks, that’s what you can expect. Filtering by availability, like you pointed, will show only the ones available at the moment. ;-)

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