I have a project (containing 4 tasks) with a Defer date set. No due date is set. Project is sequential.
I want the project to repeat every week on Tuesday, so I have it set to “Repeat Every” “1 week” on “Tuesday".
The individual tasks don’t have any defer dates set.
I’m working on the project on Tuesday. I complete the first 2 tasks (yay me!).
I end up needing to defer the last 2 tasks to the next day (Wednesday, boo me!).
Now on Wednesday I complete these 2 tasks. The project is set to complete when the last task is finished, and the repeat kicks in.
But now, the Defer date on the first 2 tasks is correct (next Tuesday), but those last 2 tasks are set to next Wednesday.
Is there any way to avoid this? I tried doing the same set up, but using due dates instead of defer dates and the result is the same. (I try to avoid due dates unless a project/task absolutely must be done by that date).
As far as I can tell I have these options:
Defer the project instead of the individual tasks. This does what I need, but would be tedious if the Perspective I’m in doesn’t show projects.
Set repeat schedule on tasks instead of projects. This would work, but doesn’t feel quite right, and the project is never Deferred so it shows up in some perspectives that I don’t want it to. Also, for sequential projects, the tasks after the first task never show up as Available.
Do NOT set defer dates on tasks inside projects or action groups that themselves are already deferred (see below). As to your issue 1, I honestly do not understand it. Please clarify. Do you mean for example
Once you complete the first two tasks, you never see the remaining two in some favorite perspective.
Once you complete the first two tasks, you do not see something about the project in your favorite perspective.
Do NOT set individual repeat schedules on tasks inside a project or action group. This will cause multiple tasks to appear at odd intervals and out of sequence, with issues that you have already noted.
The problem is neither of those mentioned. It is that in whichever perspective I’m viewing, be it my “Today” view or “Forecast”, the tasks show up - but I don’t want to see them until tomorrow if I know I won’t get to them today.
To expand on the example more, consider that I did the first 2 tasks of the project, but then an important customer got in touch with me and it’s going to take me the rest of the day to handle this problem (to make this more clear, assume that handling the problem requires me to activate some other project or set of projects in OmniFocus). Now those next 2 tasks of the project I began earlier in the day need to be pushed back until tomorrow. I would rather not see them in my working perspectives at all until tomorrow.
The only way I’ve found to accomplish this (my Option 1 from above) is to change the defer date on the project instead of the tasks. That accomplishes the goal: Don’t show these tasks as being available again until tomorrow, and also don’t mess up the repeating project.
To do that, I need to “Show in Projects” on one of the tasks, then change the project’s defer date +1 day, and switch back to my perspective.
To be clear, this isn’t a HUGE amount of work or anything, but it also isn’t very clear/obvious. It would be easy to forget to do this once (change defer date on a task), and accidentally end up with a screwed up project.
Flag tasks that you want to “see” today, unflag everything else, and only work from the flagged view
Set a Review date of EVERY DAY for the Project. When you are done with a set of tasks inside of it, put the Project to a status of On Hold. During your morning review, decide to activate it or not.
I prefer to use Defer dates for cases where an external situation says that something cannot be done until a certain date rather than using them to define when I want to see something again. The ON HOLD status is for the latter situation.
I would note that, at some point, OmniGroup has promised that we can put tasks on hold (or dropped) in the same way that we can now do with Projects.
