I want to be able to hide tasks with no start date. Usually these are my tasks that I want to start Someday, with no definite date yet.
I know I could set some future start date, but I want to avoid that. It creates visual clutter, and a blank start date is my visual cue for me on whether it’s time to finally get around to starting that tasks or not.
Anyone?
Create a Single Action List and label it something like:
Work Someday/Maybe
House Someday/Maybe
Personal Someday/Maybe
Set the status to “On Hold”
The On Hold status will hide any tasks from the Someday/Maybe single action lists from any perspective that shows “available tasks.”
Set the next review cycle to one week. If you check your review perspective on a daily or weekly basis, you’ll see the Someday/Maybe list show up. Then you can elect to move any of these someday/maybe tasks to another single action list or project that has the status set to “Active.” This will make the task available in all perspectives that show available tasks.
You will always see these someday/maybe tasks because you will be reminded about them during your next review date.
If you have the pro version of Omnifocus, you could create a perspective with actions grouped by defer date. This will not really hide the tasks without start dates, but it will place them at the bottom of the list.
Along the lines of what @wilsonng suggests, create a someday context for these tasks, and put the context on hold.
Here’s my kludgy solution: I created an AppleScript to automatically defer a task an arbitrary far-future date. I created a second AppleScript to toggle view of deferred items. Both scripts live in my tool bar. (Kudos to Omni for allowing any AppleScript to be embedded in the tool bar for easy access!)
In practice, I select an item I want to defer to “someday”, then click on the toolbar button correspond to the first script. Boom, it’s deferred; a Cleanup makes it disappear visually. If I want to view all such punted items, clicking on the toolbar button corresponding to the second script makes them all visible.
Definitely imperfect, but it’s the closest I could come to simulating Things’ “someday” feature.
My solution so far has been to group these tasks in the project folder rather than make a “some day” folder for Work, Personal, etc. projects. Then I give these ‘someday’ tasks a future date, like 6 months from now or a year from now. I have decided that I should be consistent and give the same date for all such someday tasks in all projects, e.g. next summer, so that when I do a review, e.g. next summer, I can extend the date again as I see fit.
Set up a context called “Someday,” and put it at the bottom of your context list. Exclude it from all your custom contexts.
Make a custom perspective highlighting only the Someday context, and group by Project. This approach allows you to include your someday actions in existing projects without them appearing on your action lists. It also lets you review them in their respective projects. When you want to activate them, you change the context, and the action will appear on your lists.
I made a sort of “hybrid” solution based on the suggestions above.
I made sure all Someday tasks have a due date of Dec 31, 2016. Then I created a context called ***someday so that I have a visual cue of all the tasks in that project that I would like to put on hold.
Although assigning them to another project and mark them as Hold is tempting, the number of projects I am currently managing made this cumbersome.
Thanks to everyone for all their suggestions. Hopefully the Omnigrouop team would also consider adding another filter so that this can be addressed intuitively.
