I bought OmniFocus 2 for iPad and iPhone yesterday, and so far I’m really liking it - it fits my brain perfectly. I do however have two small questions/gripes:
When viewing my list of projects, is there a way to only show the projects that belong to a specific context? I can go into that specific context but it doesn’t show me a list of projects, only a list of actions. This is the only thing that kind of bugs me so far, as a list of all my (largely unrelated and cluttered) projects is pretty unhelpful.
What are perspectives? There doesn’t seem to be a simple explanation anywhere that I can see - my googling just yielded a bunch of people listing their perspectives. I get the feeling these might be Mac-only, but even if so I’d like to have a rough idea of what they are. Can anyone link to a brief description?
I don’t see a way of doing this - I might have missed it
Perspectives are simply views or, for all practical purposes, saveable smart searches. You select based on your chosen criteria and save. They’re available in the Pro upgrade for iPhone/iPad and on the desktop in the Pro version. The standard views in the app are pre-built perspectives. As an example, although I have separate projects for each of my clients, I create perspectives to enable me to get different views for different purposes
If you Google Omnifocus Perspectives, you’ll find some interesting and useful sites with examples of how people use them, and there’s a manual here:
Perspectives are very helpful for presenting your data in the ways that are most meaningful to you. For example, you could create a perspective that shows projects the way you ask for in your first question. I have only tried it in the Mac version (as I only have the Pro version on that platform), but I assume it would work in the same way on Ipad/Iphone. In the Pro version: create a perspective, choose ”Don’t use project hierarchy”, and set ”Group actions by” to Project. When you choose that perspective, it should let you pick a context and have the projects shown that belong to that context.
There are lots of other adjustments you could do in the perspectives you can create in the Pro version. One of my favourites is to set ”Filter by availability” to ”First available”, to just show the first action in each of the selected projects, and thereby avoid being overwhelmed by all the tasks that are waiting. The Pro version is highly recommended!
Hi @samirelanduk, in OmniFocus a perspective is essentially a ‘saved view state’. All of your actions, projects, and folders are arranged in the order you specify in the Projects perspective, but you can also view, and interact with, those items in different ways in other perspectives. Forecast, Inbox, Contexts, Flagged, Nearby, and Review are all built-in perspectives, and in Pro you can also create your own custom perspectives. A perspective is just presenting your items to you in a different layout of your choosing. In case it helps, this section of our online documentation has more information on perspectives in OmniFocus 2 for iOS.
