For my OmniFocus layout, I try to mimic the ‘Things’ app’s layout somewhat. I have five perspectives that constitute my main layout, and then dozens of others below them. But, I reign in my system’s complexity by having a simple layout in keeping with conventional wisdom.
These consist of my:
Inbox - Pretty self explanatory, the built-in perspective
Today - Flagged tasks OR due soon tasks (could use the built-in Flagged perspective if you prefer)
Next - All available tasks from projects, excluding certain contexts that are saved for other specific uses; all the things I can do in my normal environments
Deferred - Any tasks that will appear in the ‘Next’ perspective at a future point in time*
Someday - The contents of my Someday/Maybe list project (or, alternatively, anything currently set to ‘On Hold,’ though again excluding certain contexts)
This works pretty well, and lets me leverage both the elegant simplicity of something like Things with the powerful complexity OmniFocus provides. The problem is with the Deferred perspective. What I described above is how I would like for this perspective to function. However, the closest OmniFocus will let me come to this is to show me all Remaining tasks, grouped and sorted by Defer Date. This leaves me with a behemoth of tasks, many of which have a Defer date in the past, making them either currently available tasks or tasks that were formally deferred to a date in the past and are yet blocked by a sequential task dependency. On the Mac and iPad, this perspective can still be somewhat useful, as I can quickly collapse the groupings up until I get to the “Tomorrow” and beyond groupings. Then, I can view tasks that are deferred to sometime in the future.
You’re probably wondering why I do not just use the built-in Forecast perspective. Well, as it is, I do not want to see tasks that are due on the day I’m looking at, just those that have been deferred to then. Also, the Forecast perspective does not allow me to exclude certain contexts or projects, leaving me with a hopelessly confused mess of items from groceries to long sequential projects that appear on the same day, etc.
What I would really like to be able to do is modify my existing Deferred perspective to be able to exclude anything with a Defer date in the past. (Another nice thing, for both this and the Forecast perspective, would be to only show me the “First Remaining” task, similar to the ‘First Available’ task but for yet-unavailable sequential projects. For example, my massive sequential ‘Weekly Review’ project could simply show up as the first task, not all fifty million items within.) A thought occurred to me that this could perhaps theoretically be mended by Applescript. Would it not be possible to, say on a daily basis, run a script that would find tasks that have a defer date after the current date/time and append the Note field of the task with a keyword like “DEFERFUTURE.” (We would set our Deferred perspective to “find text: DEFERFUTURE.”)
At this point, the script would be very useful and helpful already. However, to take this to its ultimate conclusion, it could then find tasks which contain “DEFERFUTURE” whose defer dates are earlier than the current date/time and remove the keyword from their Notes fields. However, even if this were not part of the script, it would already cut down greatly on the unwanted inclusions of things in my Deferred perspective.
I know nothing about how to script on the Mac, so I leave this as an idea in case anyone with the knowhow would find it useful and care to implement it for themselves and share it.