Noting the recently announced introduction of Planned dates in OF4.7 — I make a lot of use of defer dates to keep tasks and projects out of my Available perspective. I’d appreciate comments from folk who’ve clearly given this a lot of thought as to how they see Planned dates being used and their rationale for the Planned/Deferred distinction?
Thanks as ever for an indispensable product!
The defer date indicates when you want a task to become available. Until that date, it won’t show up in any perspectives that are filtering out unavailable tasks. It’s a way of hiding future work so it’s not distracting you today. You’ll start to see available tasks in various perspectives as soon as they’ve reached their defer date.
The new planned date is for scheduling when you actually plan to do the task. It could be days or weeks or months later than the defer date. It doesn’t affect the status of a task, unlike defer dates which change a task from unavailable to available (or due dates which change a task to due soon and then overdue). But it can be used to make a task show up in Forecast at the scheduled time, or to have the app send you a notification to remind you about the task at that time.
If you’ve found that you’re wanting to schedule tasks, and you’ve previously been trying to use due dates for that purpose (leading to constantly pushing back due dates that didn’t get done, and desensitizing you to the important must complete on time due dates in your life), or if you’ve been frustrated trying to use defer dates to schedule tasks (which weren’t really designed for that purpose, making it easy for those dates to slip by unnoticed when life gets too busy), then you might find it easier to work with the new planned dates to help you schedule work without interfering with the work’s actual constraints.
Because planned dates don’t express a constraint, they are applied to subtasks differently than defer dates (where deferring a project defers all items within) and due dates (where a due project makes all items due). The parent item’s schedule date becomes the default for all subtasks, but you can choose to override that for any subtask and schedule it for an earlier or later date.
Thanks @kcase very clear!
Apt summation of the use case for Planned date types. I am truly delighted with this one new feature. It alone COULD have been brought into v5 and it would have sold a lot of fresh licenses and created a ruckus among existing users, but I would have happily paid for it.
Thank you for incorporating it into the current version. It has infused a much needed reprieve as well as clarity into task management and acting upon tasks. This level of thoughtfulness is really why Omni Group is what it is. Cannot thank you enough for this.
@kcase , thank you very much for creating, maintaining and improving Omnifocus. If you knew the number of people in the world that thanks to you use omnifocus as part of your life, you would be surprised.
Simply that, thanks !!!
I understand what you say, although I, fan of Omnifocus since its inception, I could tell you that there are many people who, we prefer the system of paying “life” license in each new version, million times better than the subscription license adopted by the majority.
If Omnifocus version 5 does not have this new function because version 4.7 has it, I will continue to pay my Lifetime license even if it is only to support the constant work of Omnifocus and its progress. :)
Ken I still don’t understand why something with a defer date doesn’t roll forward in Forecast view automatically once the defer date is hit. If it is the earliest date something becomes available why does it then disappear off the Forecast completely the next day (unless of course I manually roll it forward)? I generally don’t use due dates as most things don’t have hard due dates but I’ve been burned in the past by items falling off the Forecast. I took care of that with a Today perspective that will grab anything with a defer date within the last 7 days which helps avoid losing things but shouldn’t really be necessary.
All that said…4.7 is a fabulous release. So many cool things.
The purpose of deferring a task is to hide it from your lists of available tasks for a period of time. The intent is that it makes the task less prominent during that time; once the defer date is reached, it will reappear among the rest of your available tasks. Deferring a task isn’t intended to make it more important than any of your other available tasks.
Perhaps an example will help to illustrate. Let’s say I go on vacation, and while I’m out I defer everything in my database for a week that I’m not planning to do during the vacation. When my vacation ends, everything I deferred during the vacation will automatically reappear in whatever views they were previously in. Showing all deferred-on-vacation tasks in Forecast would elevate their visibility above all my other tasks, but none of those deferred tasks are more relevant than the tasks I didn’t defer. They’re just tasks that were at some point unavailable—and now they’re available again like everything else. Since they’re available again, they show up again everywhere that they were showing up before they were deferred. Flagged tasks that were deferred will once again show up in lists of available Flagged tasks. So when I’m looking for things to do, I can look for them in the same perspectives where I found them in the first place, alongside similar available tasks that weren’t deferred.
I’m not worried about missing when a deferred task becomes available, because a task becoming available doesn’t make it a higher priority task. Higher priority tasks will have some other aspect that indicates their priority, such as being flagged, or tagged, or having a due date.
And with the new Planned Date field in 4.7, we now have a tool specifically designed for scheduling tasks and making them more prominent on their scheduled dates.
I’m really loving the new planned task option Ken but unsure how it relates to recurring tasks. I’m tempted to use it for daily repeats, because I could remove “deferred” from the Forecast. But then those tasks would clutter up “available” views…
I still don’t agree haha. But I see exactly the intent of the design so thanks for the thorough example. The reality is its an available/unavailable indicator and not a scheduling indicator which is the explanation for the new planned date. I guess this boils down to its a me problem and not an OF problem ;). Now that planned is here I’ll start working with that more.
Again great update! Y’all really killed it too with the updates to the repeating options. Really good stuff!
My suggestion is that you assign both a planned date and a defer date to those repeating tasks. That way you can remove deferred tasks from Forecast, but the repeating tasks still won’t clutter up your available views.
Yeah it’s a good question. I’m trying to figure out how I would do something like my every 3 weeks week-long support stint. I want the project to repeat with a defer every three weeks because i dont want it available until it’s my turn. But then every day for a week I have a set of tasks I need to complete so I guess those are a planned date with their own repeat?
Excellent! Thanks Ken.
