As the title says, I am in urgent need of a perspective that aggregates tasks by defer date. I use defer very actively to schedule tasks that I want to start on certain days.
I am using a “Today” perspective that currently collects flagged and due tasks. I want to have defered tasks in there as well to turn this into a true “Today Hub”
My workaround is to flag the task, and then set the defer date, so I am kind of abusing the flag as my “next” marker to make sure the task pops up in my perspective. My dream perspective would be a perspective that shows:
Flagged tasks
Due tasks <= today
Start <= today
Ordered by due date -> flagged -> start today
The Forecast shows this already very very good with the exception of flagged tickets. So OmniFocus is already capable of doing this. Now I just want to stuff it into my own perspective :)
To me, there actually is a value in having the due tasks separated from the start today tasks. I know I have to finish the due tasks first. When that is done, I can switch to my perspective Deferred, which shows all deferred tasks grouped by defer date, and start working on the tasks with start dates today or earlier. But of course, if you really want to gather everything in one perspective, you have to solve it differently.
I think the thing is that philosophically, at least in OF terms, I think defer is meant for tasks to “start no earlier than” rather than “start on”. Defer hides things from being available, but it doesn’t prescribe when work on any one available thing should start.
To that end, I have used the same flag+defer approach as you for “start on”, or might also make a meta task of “start this part of the project” that is deferred to and due on the same date. Yes, a bit of an extra step, but I also defer stuff mostly for the purpose of “start no earlier than” so I want to make sure the two use cases for defer dates are kept really clearly separated in terms of how they are managed.
One might also make the argument, though, that if a task has to occur or start on a very specific day, the calendar might be a better spot than OF for the management of its attention. Also an option.
