Issue with Deferring a Recurring Task

OmniFocus
1

I found what I believe is a bug/issue with repeating events + deferred dates.

I have a recurring task to remind me to clean something in our house every 3 days. The last time this went off was Christmas Day (12/25), and I said “nah” and deferred it 1 day, to 12/26. The event fell off my custom perspective as intended, and came back the following morning (12/26) for me to check off. Cool, everything’s great.

Now, the issue. As I expected, the task’s next date was set for today, 12/29, and I did get pinged for it. However, it wasn’t showing up anywhere in my perspective. Upon investigation, it’s because:

  • My perspective is set up to not show items that are due but have a deferred date, because I want them to stay hidden until I’ve indicated being ready to deal with them.
  • The task retained its “Deferred Date == Due Date + 1”, showing that it was deferred until 12/30.

Is this expected behavior?

If you’d like to recreate similar to what I have going on:

  • Schedule a task for yesterday (in my example, 12/28), and have it repeat every day on completion
  • Defer it to today’s date (ex: 12/29)

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  • Complete the task.

My expectation at this point is that I would have an item that is due tomorrow (ex: 12/30), which I do. But the task ALSO is already deferred to the day after (ex: 12/31), which completely breaks any flow that hides deferred items.

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2 Likes
2

Omnifocus is deliberately designed this way. My workaround is to flag tasks and toggle the flag to hide or unhide them from certain perspectives. Then at least I don’t have to mess up the defer date for future repetitions. Alternatively you could make another copy of the action and adjust both the defer date and the due date on the original copy as required, but that’s not a very elegant process. Other software does things differently, for example by using a fixed repeating template, which solves this problem, but then you have to edit both the template and the current instance if you want to make a permanent change.