I did a feature request as follows below. I guess it has the more possibilities the more users ‘vote’ the request by sending an email to Omnifocus Support (omnifocus@omnigroup.com). So, if this is a feature you would also like to see, you can forward an email to support it.
[OG #2530437] feature request. Perspectives with a time range
I refer to the possibility of running a perspective with the same
functionalities that we have today but being able to choose a time
period in the past to run the perspective.
I suppose it is not a very simple thing to do, but conceptually it
would be reusing all existing the perspective logic adding a new
field to specify time periods for the search. This would give us users analytic
functionalities to be able to look back and find out how we used our
time in the past and be able to identify trends and other tag driven
findings, the same way that we can look at our bank accounts and find
out our expenses and budget categories (tags) in a certain time period in the
past.
If your saying you would like to see completed tasks within a period you can to some extent do this with show completed tasks sorted and grouped by completion.
The issue with a designated time period as it means archiving old projects could cause conflicts and not archiving caused potential DB corruption.
It also would only show the tasks not the time taken and the duration field unless micro managed is only a best guess.
My feeling is this more a user case for dedicated time tracking software like toggl or similar which are specifically set up for these sort of scenarios
I have tried with the completed task perspective you describe but it is insufficient for my purposes. Maybe if I could export the perspective with tasks and associated metadata to Excel I could do the analytics myself, but I’m not aware of this functionality either in OF. ¿Do you know if it can be done?
I understand you would need to access the archive to be able to develop this back time functionality. I guess it is not easy but not impossible either. Else, at least the new perspective could show what is not yet archived and I would need to run and export this perspective periodically before tasks get archived.
I don’t really care about time tracking in this functionality, in more detail than a day. I don’t use time estimates for the tasks and do not measure my productivity. What I would like to be able to analyze is if my time allocation matches my values and priorities and other ad hoc tags I can add to the tasks in a general view.
I have used toggl a couple of times when I did want to measure how I spend my time more in detail. I agree Toggl is a valid tool for this analysis, I just wanted not to have to log twice the same task in both systems and instead use the timestamps and metadata existing in omnifocus for each task. But as you suggest, maybe an integration interface with toggle or a similar sw would be an alternative.
Maybe another alternative could be to dump the OF Archive to Excel and do the analytics in Excel.
So I guess, to summarize, I would like to see the time back perspective in OF and be able to download it to Excel. Next, I could work with the raw export of tasks and associated metadata from OF if it could be done in a consistent way, and , third, I could dump the OF data into Toggl or similar to take advantage of Toggl functionalities.
I am not aware that any of these alternatives are possible today
