Thanks very much!
Iāve gobbled together a script that allows me to add any label to actions (and remove it again). Using BetterTouchTool I use a hot key to run it. Using Perspectives with a search query I can see them in one view. Basically automating stuff that @rogbar does manually.
Note: Contexts I use for āEnergyā, āPeople/Meetingsā & āLocationā which are more or less independent and hence usable as is, mainly for reviewing what next (but Iād love to be able to see those as separate columns!). Defer date/Due date I use specifically for stuff which needs to be done by that date for a good reason (the forecast view (great thing) is the first view I enter when starting in the morning, and I am pretty anal about it being empty by the end of the day).
Examples:
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Replying to an e-mail from a good friend is importantto me, hence flagged, and I will have time for this on Wednesday in the train back home, labeled with [Wed], assigned it the context āFull focusā and a due date 10 days from now to make sure I do it in a timely fashion.
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Getting a cutting blade is not important to me (-> unflagged) but marked [Wed] as well, as I will be walking past a store that has them, so it could be done; context is āHardware storeā (which I usually go to in the weekends, but getting it earlier would be a bonus). No due date even though my son wonāt be able to use his bike until Iāve cut open his lock.
Importance and relevance of an action is time dependent: What seemed important yesterday is no longer important today. Postponing an action usually leads to procrastination on it.
If anyone is interested Iād be more than happy to make the script available.
(OF Pro, iPad, iPhone; 800+ actions, 250+ projects; 50+ contexts, 15+ perspectives)
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Nick,
Sounds really interesting. Would appreciate if you could share your script.
Cheers,
Horst
Right, finally had some time available this evening on the couch. You can find the script to add labels to an action and easily remove them again at
https://www.hibma.org/~nick/OmniFocus/
If you have any comments, send me a private message in these forums and Iāll try to answer those as quickly as possible.
Disclaimer: If it breaks, you get to keep the pieces.
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Nick,
Fantastic script. Thank you for sharing and spending time on writing up a README for your solution. I appreciate it.
Cheers,
Horst
The way that Things handles tags is spot onā¦
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And for the record, Iāve used every version of Omnifocus since the first Alpha on the Mac and much as I love it, I still dearly wish it had tags every time I use itā¦ :-(
I hope OmniFocus will add tags. Tags are a modern software innovation; they are very intuitive and simple. Appleās application of tags in OS X Mavericks and Yosemite is a good example of how to do it well.
I suspect that if David Allen ever writes a new edition of Getting Things Done that includes a computer/smartphone-based GTD system, he will look favorably toward tags.
I love OmniFocus and have used it for over eight years. I also like tags a lot. I have been investigating other productivity apps, many of which use tags. None of the competing options are as good as OmniFocus. The question is which will happen first: one of the competing options gets good enough, or OmniFocus adds tags. I know that if Omni adds tags to OmniFocus, it will be done extremely well and elegantly.
Just for the record, David Allen is writing on the new version of GTD
He was talking about it in a very very helpful podcast on MPU-
and he explicitly despises tags!
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Nothing like trying a new app to make one do a proper review and drop a load of dead projects eh?
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I know exactly what you mean. I am at my least productive when a new version of something like Omnifocus hitsā¦gotta play with it for a while :)
Joking aside though, the whole tags debate could be resolved in a heartbeat by the Omni team making it a toggle-on/off feature in settings. Whatever your preferences on the matter, theyād have you covered.
For the record, I have actually stopped using omnifocus entirely over this issue; happily using 2do, tagging whatever I need.
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I have to agree with RiK on the whole tags thing. It seems to me that
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yes - Cultured Codes Things does a good job of providing tagging functionality that the user can take or leave as appropriate to the way they work.
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Strict David Allen style GTD vs itās various spin-offs such as Priactaās TRO (which I persoanlly find more useful and better supports my needs) shouldnāt to be elevated to the status of a religious debate - but OFās present policy of strict adherence to David Allenās specific methodology is a frustratingingly dogmatic position to take - as a user it feels like I am having someone elseās āway of doing thingsā rammed down my throat. Itās uncomfortable.
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I donāt really understand it from a software engineering perspective either - certainly it seems there are more than enough users desirous of the feature to make the story valid. Implementing the code should be relatively trivial. And as has been pointed out- the feature could be made entirely optional. So it seems to me the value proposition is there. I for one abandoned OF1 for CC Things over the lack of tagging support. I would turn back to OF2 (or 3) in a heartbeat, though, if that functionality were added and as long as the bulk of my old OF1 applescripts still worked.
I loved OF1 for itās applescript-ability. It made it very easy to tie things together - using like evernote and devonthink as filing respoitories for project information. I miss the variety of useful scripts available for OF and other productivity tools.
I also liked the ability to customise the appearance of OF1 so heavily - especilliy in terms of color schemes. I am a complete āSolarizedā convert, and try to get at the very least a ādark lookā scheme for just about every app on my mac. I spend a lot of my work day staring at the screen, so anything that reduces eye strain and the glare of white on the screen is a good thing. I have only used the the beta versions of OF2, though, so perhaps the release versions permit this nowadays.
But number one - top of my OF wishlist is still tagging.
I do hope that a future version of OF will open up this one āoptional extraā. It would win my custom back from CC Things.
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To me, Omnifocus has so much more to offer than Things regarding productivity that I would never think of going back (I used Things before), even if I miss the tags. But there is no dogmatic position, there are just sync compatibility issues. Tags, or something similar, will be coming, as Ken Case explains in this post:
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Nothing is as easy it seems. If tags are implemented, that will most likely create a cascading ripple effect that changes everything.
I donāt doubt that tags will be coming. Up to this point, OmniFOcus has been more about changing the user interface and slowly updating three platforms (updating the Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps up to near-equal feature specs). Then hopefully weāll be getting that much talked about push syncing to bring almost instantaneous updating.
The last thing to come out would be features that will change the database structure. When the database structure gets changed, thatās when weāll probably see tags.
Despite the lack of tags, I just canāt go back to Things.
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I have not seen a single reason in the thread why there shouldnāt / couldnāt be tags.
- There is no complexity if you donāt use tags. Keep it turned off by default, warn people, etc. Software is for all users and how one user group uses the app should not affect the other user group.
- There is no issue with compatibility. It is just one more column to the database. Applications migrate databases all the time. The application could either leave the old tasks without tags or give them āno-tagā tag like the āno contextā context. Let the user decide when they try to tag the first item.
- One can abuse / misuse contexts and perspectives as much as tags. Not a valid reason.
If you read my post, and especially the linked post by Ken Case from The Omni Group, you would know that tags, or something similar, will be coming. Thereās no need for arguing about it. Regarding the compatibility, I believe The Omni Group when they say that backward compatibility will be broken when they add tags. You actually talk in your post about migrating databases, and to me, that sounds like something new versions of Omnifocus could do, not old.
Well. New version would have tags, not old version. So not an issue. If you have new version, problem solved. If you have old version, no tag, no problem. Or am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing something. Read the last part of the post I linked to.
The only problem that I can see with your solution is that it does not allow for easy managing those tags, you have to go into each individual task to make those changes where there might be occasions you want to retag a group of items
