Repeating Projects with Sequential Tasks Help

OmniFocus
#1

Used OmniFocus for about 2 months now but stuck on trying to figure this out.

I visit 10 franchises in my region around every 4 months. I have to prepare a pre-visit letter to the franchise 10 days ahead of the visit, complete some pre-visit paperwork a few days before, do the actual visit, and then a follow-up letter within 3 days. Those are the sequential tasks to complete.

Project: Franchise A Visit (once all items are complete, a duplicate project for the next visit 4 months later populates)
Sequential Task 1: Pre-Visit Letter 10 days before visit
Sequential Task 2: Pre-visit documentation a few days before
Sequential Task 3: Actually Franchise visit
Sequential Task 4: Follow-up Letter within 3 days

After all Tasks are complete, the project is complete and a new franchise visit for roughly 4 months later is created.

Is there anyway to do that and if so, can someone walk me through the options to create it?

Thank you!

Ron

#2

What you want shouldn’t be too complicated. I made an example project pretty much exactly to your specifications (contexts omitted):

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When the project repeats, the actions all keep their dates aligned to be four months after the last. They could potentially get messy, though as they may get chucked onto days off or weekends. Presumably you’d catch that in your reviews, but if you don’t use a review, you might want to create an action to remind yourself to reschedule them.

Does this work for you?

#3

You may want to set it to repeat every 16 weeks (instead of 4 months) on a Monday for instance as a way to avoid weeekends…

#4

Here’s how I would handle this. Just an option:

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#5

Hi! Do you happen to have an update for this for the latest version? I cannot figure out how to get my sequential projects to repeat for the life of me. I have about a half a dozen that need to repeat every week or two weeks. When I set a date for the project and complete it, all the old dates populate instead of ticking over onto the new dates. I know this is old thread, but I’d appreciate any help!

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#6

Hi, Erna.

The way OmniFocus handles this may have changed in version 3, or I may have had a mistake when I set that up.

I just tried again, and if I give the project a defer date, as well as the contained actions, it seems to work.

This is how I have the project set up and it seems to work:

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#7

Oh my goodness, this worked! Thank you so much. I’m been trying to figure this out for months and finally decided to reach out to the forum this week. I don’t understand the logic behind a defer date making this whole thing click, but I’m glad it’s solved. Thanks again!

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#8

I don’t understand it either! Perhaps it’s more a shortcut to get the desired outcome than logic. Regardless, I’m really happy it worked for you.

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#9

Sadly, this didn’t work for me. It’s literally just an 8-step morning routine. In the past, I used theses kinds of projects all the time, but now they don’t work for me.

I went back to my routine per your instructions and added defer dates to every item (tedious!). The items showed up for the deferred date, but did not show up again the next day.

Ideas? This should be an easy thing, I think.