I really cannot figure out how to use the review perspective effectively. Shouldn’t all projects be listed there by default? None of mine are until I tap & hold them to select “Review” manually.
What is worse, doing so takes me directly to the review perspective so in order to add another project I have to go back to the project perspective and traverse the entire hierarchy once again. For anything more complicated than a few flat projects, this is an overkill!
What am I doing wrong?
Each project has a review frequency. projects will only appear under review when the review frequency has expired.
e.g. if you review a task today with a 7 day review period, it will appear in review again next Tuesday.
Yes, I’m aware of that.
My question is about the initial review of a given project. It appears that when I create a new project it’s not added to the list of projects awaiting review automatically. I have to do it manually for each project. And when there’s more than 10 of them, this is becoming really annoying.
On top of that, I can see no list of projects that have been added to the review queue. So for those that have been actually reviewed and disappeared from the Review perspective until their next turn, you can never say (or can you?) if they are in the queue or not.
Sorry for the confusion here! In the past, we’ve had customers tell us that making every possible thing visible causes them to feel overwhelmed or distracted. As you mentioned, you can review any project at any time via the tap/hold/tap Review method. To avoid that problem I mentioned above, though, the Review screen only shows you the projects that have review dates in the past.
I suspect the reason why you’re not seeing more of your projects in the Review list is because the projects have been newly-created. By default, OmniFocus sets a review date on new projects that’s one week after they were created. Within a couple of days, you’ll start seeing projects appear there automatically. Hope that helps!
Thank you for this explanation, Brian. That clarified things a little bit :)
Yes, indeed these were new projects as I’m a fresh convert to OF. Now I’ll be looking forward to seeing them show up in the Review list in a couple of days!
One more question concerning reviews. Inside the perspective, for each reviewed project one can set when the next review should take place.
There are two settings inside: review every and next review. It seems to me, that the latter is ignored. For instance, I can ask to have the next review in 3 days, but if “review every” is set to 1 day, after completing the review, the next date will be set to tomorrow. Conversely, if in the same scenario, having set “review every” to 1 week, the next review date will be in exactly one week.
A bug or a feature I don’t understand?
Sorry for the delayed response - had to spend a couple of days working on the email side of things before I could drop back in here.
“Review Every” is basically setting up some parameters and telling OmniFocus what you want to do in order to compute the next review date when you do one. The “Next Review” field is there for you to assign a custom date if you want one, but if you have Review Every set and complete a view, whatever date is computed according to the Review Every interval that’s been specified is going to take precedence.
