Ken, we have been asking for this feature literally for years. Appreciate the information you are conveying, but can you do better than it’s just not happening in 2016? How about committing to (1H?) 2017 at least?
I think that most software companies would rather not commit despite public urging. Ken has already distinctly said what will happen in 2016 in the blog posts and in the above reply. Doing multiple contexts has huge ramifications in user interface and workflow matters. This is a huge undertaking. Reading his reply indicates that he is not going to commit to 1H 2017. When the multiple context/tags feature is sufficiently developed enough, we will see it in the OmniFocus public tests that you can sign up for. The last thing we want is a half baked feature and we don’t know which way it is going. Patience is the keyword here. It will come soon enough.
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Ken, could you detail (ideally in a separate post) what features are currently considered for OF in 2017–both those dependent of new file format and those not depending on it?
If history is any indication, within a month or so, we’ll all see the 2016 in review and 2017 roadmap blog posts. :)
ScottyJ
Wow. Wading through this thread it appears to be a whole lot of navel gazing and not many solutions for real users.
Simple question with specific application: We are a small law firm. We need to slice and dice tasks and events in multiple ways. For example: Bob has a trial coming up. That simple event triggers a few things. We would like it to appear in Bob’s todo list, as well as in a firm wide “Court Date” perspective, in case something happens to Bob and someone needs to cover for him. Missed court dates can be disastrous, so we always need multiple eyeballs on those kinds of things.
Any SIMPLE suggestions for how to do this? Preferably without the use of the word “extensible” or in the response? ;0
Perhaps one of these two approaches would work …
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Set the Court Date Perspective to search for all tasks with the phrase “Court Date”. Pre- or Post-pend this phrase to the tasks that are to appear in the Court Date perspective.
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Use a context called “Court Attorney”. All tasks that can be handled by anyone get assigned that context. Include this context in the Court Date perspective. Bob puts all of his projects in his own folder. He views his portfolio of tasks from his folder. As needed/desired, when all is clear that Bob has the task at hand, toggle the Court Attorney context over to Bob as a context.
Otherwise, I’m just curious. Court dates are calendar events. Are you saying that you want OF to replace a group calendar? If so, it seems a bit off-kilter to me.
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JJW
A court date is also a due date for a bunch of tasks, so it’s not so surprising to see it in OF.
One could envisage other ways of working that could relegate a court data to a simple calendar event, but I suspect that would mean radical changes to ways of working in many legal practices.
Makes sense. Thanks.
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JJW
OmniFocus just isn’t groupware.
For this problem you probably need a law practice management package or the like, such as Daylite or RocketMatter.
Thank you very much! I sincerely appreciate the suggestion and will try it out.
The challenge is that we have disparate ages and computer skill levels. 35 yo and computer literate, up to 70 (extremely intelligent, and working at an energy level of a 40 yo, yet who is very impatient with all things computer. His participation is mission critical and he grasps the value of using an app like OF to keep track of things. So I’m trying to make our group task list as use friendly as possible. Because the tolerance for new app learning is 0. I have him liking the app. I don’t want to lose that by switching and loading an all new learning curve.
I’m trying to find the least invasive way to get everyone what they need. And until OF has tagging or multi context I’m trying to find workarounds inside the app.
Thanks. We have RM for calendar management and billing. It has limitations. It’s lousy task tracker or to-do list. It’s good for putting events on calendar, but it doesn’t provide the sort of 30, 60, 90 day snapshots that OF can provide. We have used Daylite in the past. Too much brain damage for the luddites. They won’t use it. Don’t even try. I spent a year trying to herd those cats and it’s time wsted that I’ll never get back.
And, frankly, contrary to what people here seem to say, for us, OF works fine as groupware in our context. Everyone has the same data on every case, it syncs in real time, it sends events to Google calendar which syncs to individual calendars, and it alows each person, by using contexts (e.g. “David’s To Do”) to have their own todo lists. What it doesn’t provide is a way to tag or have a second context. Thus, this topic and thread.
This is not just an OG thing, but software organisations spend so much time chasing the next shiny.
Classic example is the touch bar support.
We have thousands of Mac users in my organisation, very few of them use the laptop keyboard. They use an external monitor and an external keyboard. Yet OG is right in there with touch bar support. This is actually important to a tiny group of users.
This feature is in our roadmap for 2017 (which I posted earlier today). Here’s the relevant quote:
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Awesome, thanks! Any ETA for it?
Multiple contexts should open up quite a bit of customization including the use of a second set of contexts to assign levels of priority. I wonder if we will be able to sort by context within a context.
Although not listed in the yearly review, I am still hoping for manual sorting of tasks too.
As we start sharing hopes on how it will work, my dream is to easily OR-filter by several tags.
For example, currently I use daily todo text items because it allows to easily recall what I shortlisted for yesterday now when I’m done with most urgent for today. With new tags implemented, I could tag earlier "flagged"s as hash-date and easily review one or several earlier days to decide what I postponed and now can resume with.
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My opinion on multiple contexts (or tags) on items is that they should not be inherited. I find it quite frustrating that contexts and flags are inherited and thus show up in my custom perspectives. I’m sure there is a place for inheritance, but this has never suited my organizational goals.
This is awesome news! I have been waiting for this for ages, for me it would be extremely important and would streamline my project structure quite a bit. Can’t wait for it!
I am really glad to learn you will be adding multiple contexts. My biggest disappointment with OmniFocus is that I have to export it to a spread sheet to see projects competing for my time in relationship to each other. Any additional filter will help reduce the number of times I have to export to a spread sheet.
Yeah!!! Thank You. :-)
