Individual Tasks On Hold

A feature that would change OmniFocus for me from a great system to something truly beautiful would be the ability to put individual tasks on hold.

This would mean that I could maintain a descrete list of purely the things I intend to do that day and visit a list of On Hold items to plan what I’m doing tomorrow.

I am currently using a context titled On Hold instead. The reason this is cumbersome is that I need to then go through a list of 100+ items and mentally filter which are, say, Errands. It would be much quicker if I could retain my Projects and Contexts for the items on my On Hold list.

Anyone else keen for this feature?

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I believe the option to drop tasks is planned in the next version. I cannot recall whether on-hold is also.

An approach I use is to defer tasks or their main action groups when I know I cannot get to them and to flag only those tasks I want to do as soon as possible.


JJW

Thanks JJW.

I used to defer tasks as well but what I found was that the deferral dates were arbitrary (these are tasks that can be done at any time)

Also, I would find that each morning I’d need to weed out a whole bunch of tasks that had popped into my To Do list because their deferral date had arrived but I didn’t intend to do that day.

For that reason I like to use the deferral function only for task that are to be done on a defined date.

I have my fingers crossed for the putting tasks on hold function - having a standing list of pending things to do that I can visit to organise my tasks for the day would work perfectly! :)

Fair enough. What then does a flagged task mean for you? By example, taking the inverse of your question gives me this …

  • Unflagged --> do whenever
  • Flagged --> (intend to) do today


JJW

I’m doing exactly that now (I just figured out that this would work separating the two lists). It’d still be great to be able to use the flags for marking the important things in the list that need to be priorities for that day but for now this is the way I’ve created a list of Today items. :)

Hi folks! I just wanted to drop in and mention that a dropped status for individual actions doesn’t appear to be scheduled for implementation and release but it’s still an open feature request. If you’d like us to add your +1 to the feature request for that, please send us a quick email at omnifocus@omnigroup.com!

Hi Austin,
Would a dropped status function similarly to a hold status? Would we be able to filter a Perspective’s view to show just dropped tasks and would each task retain its project and context?

I think it would be nice to have a On Hold status for tasks too (currently only available for projects).
A dropped tasks is not the same than a task on hold, a least in its literary and conceptual conception.

I’m just adding a little vote here so the Omni team may consider adding this feature in future releases.
+1 to have On Hold status for tasks.

PS: I’m also sending this feature request via email.

One thing I have done is make a tag with the status of on hold, and assigning that tag to an action effectively puts that action on hold.

For fun, you could even call the tag “On Hold”.

A workaround to be sure, but perhaps serviceable?

Cheers,

ScottyJ

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Nice workaround Scotty, I will implement this. Thank you!

I hope the Omni team consider developing this feature anyways. Having the status attribute in two different contexts of the app (one tags other status) it is a little incongruent and can be improved.