Pretty straightforward annoyance. If I’m using the keyboard to process my Inbox items, if I’m in a perspective view, once I assign a perspective to a task and hit Tab, it jumps from the Inbox to the Perspective.
This is a fine workflow if you’re not the type of person who uses the Defer Until or Due dates. Unfortunately, I often do. As a result, I’m moving through my items, and I’m surprised when an item jumps before I can assign the Defer/Due date. This is a frustration.
Further, once the item moves, I have to tab through all fields in the item before I can get back to the dates I want to set. That’s an additional four keystrokes just to set the Defer date, not to mention the cognitive effort to keep track of what’s going on.
I suggest waiting until a user tabs out of the item entirely before moving the item into its perspective.
Is there a setting for this that I’ve missed, or is this intended behavior? If it’s intended, what do other users think?
There is a configuration setting for this (in the ‘Organization’ tab), which by default are set in such a way that the behaviour you describe won’t happen.
You can specify which fields have to be filled in in order to be able to ‘clean’ the action and also at what moment this will happen:
are you sure you’re clear about the terms ‘perspective’ and ‘project’? as far as i know, only projects and contexts are assigned from the inbox, not perspectives. (custom) perspectives are a kind of filtering process containing criteria which are applied to items which have already been assigned their context and project categories.
as was said above, the organisation preference settings should prevent the inbox items jumping too early - i.e. with the preference settings as shown in the post above.
I haven’t changed the defaults; my settings match your picture, and cleanup happens immediately when a project and context are assigned. Regardless, there is no option for “Project, Context, Defer Until Date, and Due Date”, which is what I’m looking for. The behavior isn’t helpful for people who use Defer Until and Due dates.
My mistake. I was referring to a perspective that’s context based. Omni doesn’t call perspectives by these names anymore, but perspectives used to be referred to as “Context-Based” or “Project-Based”.
The important setting here is the moment on which OmniFocus does the cleanup. You probably want to set this to ‘When changing views’. Even then, sometimes when OmniFocus syncs it will clean up anyway.
