Hi all,
How do you use OmniFocus to keep track of birthdays, holidays, and similar recurring events that require preparation time (like buying a gift)?
I know I could create a dedicated section with projects for each birthday or holiday from my calendar, but I’m wondering if there are better approaches. Just seeing the event date in the Forecast view doesn’t really help, since these aren’t projects in themselves and OmniFocus doesn’t give an automatic heads-up (e.g., two weeks before).
Do you handle these as repeating projects, defer dates, or is there another workflow that works well for you?
Obviously, other people may have different approaches, but I tend to put related recurring events in a single action project.
For birthdays, you might create a single action project called “Birthdays”
For each person create an action (e.g. ‘Prepare for XX’s Birthday’) in the project.
Set the due date as the person’s birthday.
Set the defer date to however much lead time you want before the birthday to prepare.
Set to repeat every year on the due date.
Note that you do not set these on the project, you set them on each action.
If you have a more complex set of tasks per birthday (for example you send somebody a card every year) use subtasks under the main task:
Prepare for XX’s Birthday
Buy birthday card for XX
Send birthday card to XX
This will allow you to have a single project but with independent repeating tasks/groups of tasks per birthday.
I have a project called Family Events (non repeating) and add tasks which repeat each 12 months to defer until the start of the previous month and they’re due the 15th of the previous month.
E.g. if Mum’s Birthday is the 28th of September, I have two tasks (Buy Card and Buy Present) which are deferred to the 1st of August and due on the 15th of August. Both are on a 12 month renewal when completed.
I prefer to keep them in my calendar, this seems a more natural place to keep them.
But if I need a reminder to go buy something then I set up an email reminder in the appointment, which is then forwarded to my OmniFocus inbox to create a new task.
That’s my approach too. Calendars have the option to remind you ‘n’ days before, so you have time to plan. Otherwise, if yu want to put a check on each action you need to do before the event date, I would go to the single action project as suggested above
