OmniFocus 3 - My Pitch for Duration Estimate Totals

Thanks, @kcase for publishing this. And many many thanks to @kaitlin for her generosity in developing and sharing this. She’s done a fine job, and it sure beats having to learn apple scripts that might fall over with new OF releases!

It’s still a little frustrating that I have to select my rows then run the automation, and I would much prefer to have OF show me total time at each heading break (i.e. whenever there are tasks or sub-tasks listed below). That would be the ideal, but in the meantime @kaitlin’s solution lets me plan my day, as I can get a total of how many hours my selected tasks are likely to take.

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I agree that this would be extremely useful if integrated into OmniFocus core functionality. @kaitlin’s plugin is a great help (thanks, @kaitlin!), but for me the ability to at-a-glance compare the Total Estimated Duration for every project in a view (instead of needing to run the automation for each individual project and record those totals for comparison) would save time and streamline my planning process.

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I need a task/time management app that integrates totaling task duration into the app itself. MANUALLY CLICKING TASKS AND USING A KEYSTROKE TO FIRE OFF A SCRIPT TO DO IT IS TOO CUMBERSOME AND ISN’T CUTTING IT.

After almost ten years using OmniFocus, patiently waiting for this rather basic, highly functional feature to be put in place (they are already counting the number of tasks and displaying it, can’t they simply sum estimated duration too?), I am abandoning OmniFocus as a viable solution. Clearly, for whatever reason, this functionality is never going to be included. My wife is having twins! However difficult it was to get things before, it promises to be exponentially harder soon.

Overscheduling is too easy. It’s disheartening and discouraging to every day reschedule and defer tasks, again and again and again. I would love to create task list instantly confident that I can take care of it in the allotted time. Imagine how motivating it would be to every day complete your to do list without having to defer tasks?

Can anyone recommend an app where you can specify a task duration where Total Task Time is automatically calculated?

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Another +1 here. This is valuable data that should be better considered when planning/working.

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I would also love to see this feature; I use my estimated task duration for several different slices and being able to

  1. sort my ongoing projects by their total current estimated durations would let me see which areas of my life I’m not keeping up on, and

  2. see which of my completable projects are just a tiny push away from completion–or which deserve a dedicated calendar event to milestone out properly.

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Kind of surprised this isn’t an OOTB feature yet. Would love to see this when looking at projects!

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@steinitz, I totally agree. Using fiddly and time-consuming workarounds with other Omnigroup products is not a workable option. I also balk at using a script to manually subtotal selected items - it’s an inadequate workaround.

I agree wholeheartedly. It’s time for Omnigroup to be unselfish in this, and put the needs of their users first. It would indeed be generous and noble for them to do so. In the long term, they would inevitably gain goodwill and appreciation from such action.

What @BriMercer has proposed is brilliant! It would add so much functionality to Omnifocus, and allow me to be much more productive.

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I believe I understand now why the OmniGroup doesn’t sum task duration and display it as a total.

It has to do with how OmniFocus (and most other task management programs going back to Microsoft Schedule+ back in the 1990s) handle repeating tasks.

Most programs only create a repeating task for the NEXT INSTANCE of that task. Thus, if you have a daily task of “Exercise” for 30 minutes, only one instance of that task will appear in your weekly schedule. In this example, Monday might have 30 minutes taken up by exercise, but Tuesday - Sunday will not until that Monday task is marked as complete and it respawns on Tuesday. As a result, only the upcoming day will have an accurate total task duration. Every other day will likely show less than the actual task total. There are ways to get around this shortcoming, but this would be the default behavior.

I’m disappointed that the next version of OmniFocus appears to only have cosmetic updates. Nothing substantive that will help me plan my day.

CONCLUSION: OmniFocus is great at PLANNING what I want/need to do, but terrible at helping me GET IT DONE.

I have recently stopped using OmniFocus in favor of a program called Opus One, which is so much easier to use, create tasks on the fly and painlessly change and adapt my schedule. Opus One also creates a separate instance of a repeating tasks on every day it appears. So, if you have a daily repeating task “Exercise”, “Exericse” immediately shows up every day in your schedule, opening the way for creating task duration in total minutes/hours by day, by week, by project/goal, etc.

The developers at Piso13, the makers of Opus One, are constantly making improvements. No multi-year cycles for update, like OmniFocus. What a difference it’s made to my productivity!

Currently, Opus One doesn’t have Total Task Duration in Minutes/Hours, but they are actively considering this enhancement.

I can understand the difficulty of providing estimates in the future for durations that involve recurring tasks; is there any way to get summaries of projects that do not include recurring tasks?

Or even the ability for a custom “today” perspective that at least lets me plan based on what tasks I have for today so that I can immediately push what doesn’t make sense to the morrow?