Hi All,
in OF it is easy to put a tag next to something that you want to defer again or not really review or to which you postpone the due date.
however this is a manual action, the system should help us more at least on the Mac version in capturing all things we plan badly or skip.
so the question is:
is it possible to capture the number of times we changed the defer or due date or the number of times we reviewed something that contains active items? (procrastination list, to better manage ourselves through OF).
Is it possible to extract for each recurring task the number of times it was completed on time over the last X days? (consistency - positive reinforcement)
I think Omni should ship these as standard features for OF at least on the Mac, as this could differentiate further OF into being a Pro application compared to the competition.
I’ve been using OF3 mostly for larger projects, single one-off tasks, and routine tasks that don’t need tracking.
For habit tracking purposes and streak history, I started using the Streaks app on my iPhone and iPad. It has a better interface for this type of history tracking.
Hi,
The problem is more deep-rooted than habit tracking.
If I cannot meet a deadline due to competing priorities at work, I want to have a measure of how much/how long that deadline has been rescheduled.
At present, OF does not offer this.
This is especially important for deadlines that do not depend on us and have been rescheduled.
Sorry, I don’t know if I’ve kept track of something like this in a task manager. Currently, I am using a text editor and open a text file that is basically a project log. I record notes, completed tasks, and any notes or obstacles that I may have encountered (such as missed deadlines). I’ve found that writing it out in a journal form helps me keep track of history and why something got delayed. It was easier for everyone in the team to keep tabs of what happened.
Currently, I am using the Agenda app to do personal tracking for something like this. But I realize it’s not exactly what you’re looking for.
The only other thing I can think of is to create a custom perspective that shows the project and all items. Then I can enter notes like a journal entry explaining what went wrong - what was the original due date, what happened and why, and when the new target due date is. Keeping well-described notes and documentation has helped.
I think having this perspective would make it easier to have a written history.
OF doesn’t show how many times you’ve deferred or reviewed a task or project, but it does show the date that you added it to your database and its most recent changed date. That can be an indirect way to assess how procrastination-prone it is, except for repeating tasks (which retain their original creation date).
Hi Brian,
Yes you are right. That is a sort of proxy but it is different: suppose I create a task last year and then revise its due date today when it was due.
Then suppose I have a project task that is rescheduled every week from last year, same last change date (extreme case).
In OF I have two choices:
Leave it to DUE
change due date
But I do not have the visibility of these “slipping deadlines”. This is a thing to be aware of, when you work in disorganised companies or with a lot of competing priorities.
I am wondering if I am not missing some property of defer and due, meaning there is some clever way to update the task, remove it from the immediate backlog as it has been postponed, while retaining the original due date vs the rescheduled one.
I see the issue. I don’t face it myself very often, but when I do, I’ll either put a note in the notes field, or if it seems important, in the action name, such as “[originally due 2018-03-17; rescheduled]”, to remind myself of that.
This is a good temporary suggestion. I’ve been managing a quick and dirty ledger my history of checking in on things that need monitoring in the notes section. A textexpander snippet that captures your postponement wouldn’t be terribly hard to maintain.
At the same time, I think @silvanoricci’s suggestion of a dedicated feature for this would be quite useful to me. Especially if I could then generate a perspective on the number of times something had been postponed.
