Very often I have sequential action groups where the next action should only be available a certain amount of time after I complete an action.
i.e. Once a year, I make a web payment for the business tax in my city.
Once I schedule the payment, I want the next sequential action to be to confirm that the payment went through, but I want that deferred by three or four days from when the ‘schedule payment’ action is marked complete.
I don’t know exactly when I will schedule the payment, so I don’t know exactly what will be three days from that action being marked as completed.
Am I correct that there is no way to set defer or due date relative to when the previous sequential item is completed?
I realize I could likely write a script that does this, but then I suddenly need to remember which actions I can just mark as done, and which actions I need to select and run a script on as a special case.
I can write a support ticket, but it really would be great to be able to set relative defer and due dates for sequential actions.
Thanks @Logan I will take a look once I get a chance!
And overall, I realize automation enables a lot of things - but it is always a special case of needing to remember to run a script instead of just clicking that an action is complete.
Or, in my case, forgetting, clicking that the action is complete, realizing this is one of those special cases, undoing marking the action is complete, selecting the action and running the script.
Or worse yet, forgetting, clicking that the action is complete, and then never having the subsequent action have its defer date set correctly so I end up missing the follow-up action completely.
This feature is so frequently requested, and so obvious, that it really should have been added to Omnifocus years ago, but certainly should have been built for version 4.
You say that, but you don’t know where it sits in the list of requests made customers
I can infer that it’s low on their priority list by the fact that it hasn’t been built, despite a lot of people wanting it for a long time.
or how many have made the request specifically to Omnifocus
Feature development for the Omni Group isn’t a democracy, so knowing how many people have made a request isn’t my concern.
This is why it’s important if you would like a new feature to email Omni and let them know.
I’m not playing coy with the Omni Group: they’re aware that multiple people want defer and due dates for tasks that are relative to other tasks in the same project.
I also find that email is a terrible way to communicate a feature request because it lends itself to failure modes like:
“I requested it and I never heard back from them”
“I requested it and they sent me back a boilerplate form response”
“I requested it but I have no idea if other people want the same thing”
The last of those also underscores your very point that I don’t know how many people have made the specific request.
So I appreciate your remarks, but I don’t think I’ll change from occasionally commenting in this forum to emailing all of my requests. And of course, nothing is stopping you or anyone else from emailing them about a forum post.
