Ongoing Tasks by Weekday with Tags in Forecast

I’m still struggling with having to keep track of (and prioritize) many tasks that are on-going (i.e., not getting done…)

I have been assigning them due dates by the day of the week, for types of tasks that tend to go with Mondays, others Tuesdays, etc. Since most done’t get done, I miss the due dates, and roll them forward by one week using +1 day, week, or month.

Obviously, this isn’t efficient. I was just watching a video that showed how a tag (e.g., “Next”) could be used to made tasks show under Today in the Forecast menu. I thought, great, I will make tags for each day of the week, and then use them to make those tasks show in Forecast view under the corresponding day of the week. The might work well.

But, I can’t see how to make Forecast view show tagged items any day other than today.

(Sorry, I know this general issue (basically using tasks as regular reminders) has been addressed in various forms many times. But, I still haven’t found a robust solution.)

Interesting. I just found this:

https://inside.omnifocus.com/peter-akkies2

Which elaborates on why I am overusing due dates. But, then it ends with this:

“If you’d like to mark, in OmniFocus, what you plan to work on on a given day, use tags! For example, you can use a “next” tag and show tasks with that tag under Today in the Forecast Perspective (in the Pro edition). Or you could create a tag for each day of the week. You have options.”

OK, but how do I make those day-of-the-week tags show up in the corresponding days of the week in Forecast?

If you’re wanting to be able to click on the next Wednesday date, and see the items you’ve tagged “Wednesday”, unfortunately there isn’t a way to do that. There’s only one Forecast tag at a time, and it only shows up in Today.

Probably the best you could do in Forecast is to switch your Forecast tag to the right day-of-the-week tag as part of a startup routine? Granted, that doesn’t strike me as an ideal solution.

“There’s only one Forecast tag at a time, and it only shows up in Today.”

Thanks, but that’s a Bummer: It pretty much means that my forecast-by-daily-tags idea is not going to help.

So, that leaves me back where I have been stuck for several years: How to use tasks as reminders without assigning due dates that are not real due dates?

The only way I can think of is if each day you manually change the setting for the forecast tag to be that day’s tag.

One way I was dealing with a similar problem was to combine the forecast tag with deferring. I would have tasks for Wednesday, for example, which I would never actually complete but would just defer by one week, either when I finished them or at the end of the day. That way they wouldn’t show up again until next Wednesday.

You could have a tag for each day of the week, and then have a custom perspective showing the actions that have those tags. Set the perspective to show only available tasks and have those grouped by tags. Then you can click the button in the inspector or have a dedicated script button in the toolbar to defer a task a week, and you won’t be bothered by the task until the same day next week. If you have a perspective like this, you could also focus on the current day by clicking on the day in the left sidebar. This might work for you. I liked it at least when i tried it.

I don’t recommend assigning days of the week as a scheduling method (but that’s a to-dos philosophical question…) but I can see it being useful if you have routine tasks which are particularly suited to being performed on specific days for organisational reasons.

If you wish to do this, I recommend @Jan_H’s solution. You’ll look at these tasks in their own perspective. The Forecast perspective is for things with a due date and today’s important tasks, don’t try to rely on it for everything. In addition, you could manually, or via an automation, assign your Forecast tag (eg. ‘Today’) every day to the routine actions coming up: eg. they will have the tags [Tuesday] [Today].

Jan_H’s suggestion does seem promising (thanks), but I can’t figure out how to make the custom perspective presentation arrangement to include only my “weekday” tags. Instead, what I get is a list of all the tags assigned to the tasks. That includes the new weekday tags, but also other stuff.

Yes, this will work better on the Mac. Nest all your weekday tags under a ‘Weekdays’ tag. Make sure the perspective groups actions by Tag (not ‘Tags (Combined)’), then select the Weekdays tag group in the sidebar.

Thanks. I had missed the very last step: selecting the Weekday group in the tag side bar. It still shows other tasks, which I would prefer to hide in this perspective, but that’s minor. Overall, this might just be what I need. I’ll give it a try. Thanks.

(Obviously, I am doing all of this in MacOS with a big screen. That’s because I use OF only for “higher” major-project level task/idea management. I don’t find the mobile app useful for that. For “low” level task management like shopping lists, I use Apple’s Reminder app.)

2 Likes

I think I solved my remaining problem with this: In the control panel for my custom perspective, down at the bottom, I can “add current sidebar selection”. That seems to record the tags I want to view, so I don’t have to unselect the ones that I don’t. Nice.

It might not be ideal, but you could create a weekly recurring all-day calendar event for each of those tasks. Then they’d show up on the correct days in the Forecast view.

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.