How many people here are using Defer Until Dates? Yes or no?
I defer the task only if I can do it on a particular day.
Otherwise I put the task into a Someday/Maybe project with project status set to On Hold. When I am ready to do that task, I re-assign the Project to another project with project status set to Active.
Tasks in an On Hold project will not show up in perspectives that shows all available actions.
Defer Until (or previously Start Date) is the single most powerful feature of OF over every other to-do list out there. It lets you load future actions into your list, but hide them from view until the point in time you want them visible. De-clutter. For example, I’m traveling to a different office in a few weeks and I want to do 10 things while I’m there. Each has a different context/project. I can enter them all correctly, set the defer until date for the first day I get to that office. Then those actions are out of my mind and in my system … and forgotten until I need them the day I arrive. Free mind. The other biggest use I have is recurring actions. Let’s say I want to do something every Friday. I can setup the recurring action, set the Defer Until date to be Friday at 8am, and due Friday at noon. This recurring task is only visible on Fridays from 8am-12pm. Only visible when I want it to be.
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All the time. This is one of the big advantages of OF.
Essential part of my workflow and one of my favorite features in OF.
Yes! A very important feature.
Thanks, guys! This is very helpful. I have a follow-up question.
What if you have a repeating action that is due every day at noon and you set the defer date/time to 8:00 am each morning. Now, let’s say one day you can’t get to it in the morning, so you defer the task until 1:00 PM. Now, you have an repeating action with the defer date/time set AFTER it’s due.
When you check it off, since it’s a repeating action, the next day it will have a defer date/time still set to 1:00 pm, an hour after it’s due. Won’t this mean that you won’t see the task anymore until it suddenly comes due a noon?
I think what you describe is an important missing feature, akin to how, in Calendar, you can change an event or a series (all future events).
Being able to manage single instances of a repeating series is a good feature request - I would email Omni for that.
I manage this use case by not fiddling with repeating things, unfortunately. I will mark them as done and then make a single not repeating task to do the thing and defer/flag/mark as due as needed.
ScottyJ
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If you are deferring to after the actual due date/time is there actually a hard and fast due date/time for this task? I only set due dates and times on task that are definitely due and there are consequences if not done by the due date. For all other task I use no defer or due dates or only defer dates if I cannot work on it until a certain date or time.
In this case (although I usually agree with the assessment provided by @ckpiv) I would duplicate the item, complete the repeating task, and remove repetition of the duplicate. That way I get something close to what @deturbulence describes in Apple’s Calendar.
@ckpiv A fair question, but I have monthly reports that have varying due dates monthly, or which, because of data availability, might need to be moved around. They’re due in the truest sense, but sometimes need to have their dates managed a bit.
This challenge applies to non-due things too, though - any change made to a recurring thing, even if just defer date/time, impacts all future iterations.
ScottyJ
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same here…
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i use defer dates all the time. i’m a terminal procrastinator, and messing about with OF2 is an excellent tool for this purpose.
