Things 3 offer 3 definitions of due dates which make sense to me :
Due Date – Does not fire an alert, does not become overdue
Deadline – Similar to a Due Date, but can become Overdue and get marked as such. Does not fire an alert
Reminder – An actual task alert. Can fire at a specific time on a due date, deadline, or any other time
Would be nice if Omnifocus 3 could offer something similar : currently due dates ( similar to “deadlines”) are not very efficient for me…and I actually use Apple’s reminders for true “due dates” / deadlines.
I’m not familiar with the latest things - what use cases you prefer this model for?
One thing I’ve struggled with was how to categorize things that are timely but not essential - e.g. I’m in city X for the week, I should invite friend Y to dinner.
This only makes sense to do in the next few days, but it’s only a nice idea and if I don’t get to it nothing bad happens. Setting a due date would be overkill - I don’t want these tasks to overwhelm other less timely but more important things. Right now I’m experimenting with flags for this, but it sounds like something similar to Things’ model might be helpful.
I agree that it would be useful to have more reminder control on OF. But I do think you’re not correct about how Things treated them.
I think that what you’re calling a Due Date in Things is the Start Date - task appears in Upcoming before that date and then moves into Today on that date. Equivalent to Defer Date in OF.
The Due Date is the Deadline, by which the task must be finished. Equivalent to Due in OF.
The missing OF piece is the reminder, which Things allows you to set independent of the other dates.
OmniFocus 3 will allow you to be notified at due time, defer time, “latest start” (due time minus estimated duration), at some arbitrary offset before due, and completely arbitrarily. Hopefully this will give you something workable.
Yep! Multiple notifications per task are in there too. One thing to be aware of is that iOS only lets us schedule some fixed number of notifications at once (I believe it’s in the high double digits). This could have a negative effect if you had a ton of notifications scheduled across just a few upcoming items (enough to hit the limit), but didn’t launch OmniFocus frequently—you’d be more likely run through your scheduled notifications before we had a chance to schedule more.
Our current plan to mitigate this is to have the last notification we schedule be one that prompts you to open the app so that we can schedule more, and we’ll be keeping an eye on this during TestFlight to see how effective it is.
