I have a weekly recurring task called “Weekly Review”. This task currently has 6 sub-tasks.
When the Weekly review shows up in my Today/Forecast it adds all the tasks to the total for the day - so if I have 2 tasks plus the review I have 9 in total.
Is there a way to have only the weekly Review counted as 1 task but still show the sub-tasks? If that makes sense!!
I don’t think so.
But how come you aren’t using the “Review” feature already in OF? Under “Preference” and “Dates & Times” you can set how frequently you want to review open projects. If you set that at weekly, it would work without a task… or you could set another task to review open projects to remind you to “Review.”
I also have a weekly review recurring project. It reminds me to gather things, check meetings for the next 2 weeks and various other things to ensure I’ve captured all actions. I complete these before I start to review the projects within OF.
I think if you give the key task a due date - it will give all the subtasks the same due date by default - so these are then counted as individual items.
One thing that Kourosh Dini - in his ‘Creating flow with omnifocus book’ speaks about is the use of ‘Navigation’ panel of sorts.
In this case - your weekly review would be a single task with a due date and then in the notes - you would paste a link to the actual individual tasks within the project. These tasks would have a start date but no due date and so wouldn’t contribute to the number of due tasks for the day. Once they are complete - you can then go back to the original ‘Navigation’ type task and mark it as complete.
I hope that makes sense
I do something similar, with Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual reviews, and I ran into the same issue. I don’t want a due date assigned to these. I want it as a recurring project that respawns with the appropriate ‘available date’ as soon as I finish the last one, but not with a ‘due’ date Unfortunately, I never have found a way to get OF to create a recurring project without adding a due date, which then makes the entire mess show up in Forecast, making that view pretty much unusable. I know that some GTD purists will say ‘but you have to do those things, so they should be in your view’, but to me, seeing mundane tasks reminding me to clean out my email inbox, log my hours for the day, etc. don’t belong on my work list. They aren’t things I have to get done, and I don’t want to miss an actual important task hidden in a mess of procedural reminders.
What I ended up doing is kind of like what Andrew78 suggests. I created a single task for each of these reviews, set up to repeat as appropriate, with a link in the notes to a project that contains all the detailed tasks. I have that project set up to repeat as appropriate too, so it recreates itself once complete. As soon as I’ve finished it, it reappears, but with a ‘defer until’ date automatically set. Once that happens, I simply remove that date from the project, leaving it there as a template that I can use the next time that review becomes due. The individual items don’t show up in the Forecast view this way - just the individual tasks that remind me to do them. It’s one extra, quick manual step to remove the date, and if I forget to do it, the next time I go to Forecast and see a long list of tasks related to these reviews, I can quickly go remove the date.
Not an ideal process, but it works.
How would that help in this situation? If I have a weekly review set up, which has the same list of things I need to do at the end of every week, using the internal review feature would show me the project, but if it isn’t set up to repeat, it’s going to go away if I check off the items while reviewing it. And if I set it to repeat, it will recreate itself with a due date, which will make it show up in the Forecast. The only way I could see this as a viable option is if I work down my list without actually checking off the items as complete. That’s not ideal, as I often do my weekly review over the course of the weekend, not in a single session. I’d prefer to be able to mark items as done as I finish them to avoid having to remember where I left off.
If I’m missing something in how this method could work, can you describe in more detail?
Thanks?
Reviewing it is not the same as completing it. It just means you know the item is outstanding and needs attention.
OF Manual does a much better job of explaining than I. Here is some of it:
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The Review perspective contains a flat list of projects that are due for review.
Reviewing helps make sure your projects are accurately portrayed in OmniFocus, leaving them in good shape and ready for action. If you have projects that need items added, projects that aren’t relevant anymore, or projects you don’t mean to do any time soon, following a regular review process can help you keep them from falling through the cracks.
Each project has an interval for how often you intend to review it and a date when the next review is planned. You can change the default review interval in Date & Time preferences, and you can change the review interval and next review date of individual projects with the inspector.
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