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.