Repeating tasks, defer dates and due soon

Hi Everyone,
This is my first time on the OmniFocus forum - it looks like a welcoming place and I’m hoping to get some help. I’m in the process of migrating from ‘Things’, which I really love, but which does not have calendar integration, timed alerts or the capability to attach documents to tasks. So far, I’m finding OmniFocus good, but a lot harder to navigate than ‘Things’, which is basically plug and play. There are a couple of things I can’t figure out about OmniFocus:

  • Is there a way to have the badge app icon on the iPhone show only tasks that are due today, but some other (?perspective?) that has tasks that are due soon? In ‘Things’, you can have a task show up in the ‘today’ space up to two weeks before it is due, which is really useful if you want some warning before buying someone a birthday present or something (but equally, if you have a few of those sorts of tasks, you aren’t seeing the badge icon and thinking you have to do 10 things that day instead of 3). In ‘Things’ the task is yellow, until the due date when it becomes red.

  • Is there a way to get OmniFocus to alert you when the defer date/ time comes up, rather than the due date/ time?

  • Is there a way to set repeating tasks for set days (for example, the third Saturday every month)?

Thanks in advance!

First, to answer the last two questions:

  • No, you can’t have OmniFocus alert you as deferred actions become available on iOS. You can, however get an alert on macOS.
  • Specific day repeats like you described will be available in a release later this year, according to the 2017 Roadmap.

Then, to deal with your badge and due dates question. You can adjust the ‘Due Soon’ setting in OmniFocus. Setting it to ‘Due Today’ or ‘24 hours’ will keep only those knife edge due dates in sight. However, this affects any perspectives filtered by due dates.

The best workaround may be to make a perspective of all tasks (rather than just those due), filtered as such: status: any status, available: remaining. Then set the perspective to group by due date. This will show you things upcoming at the top down to the farthest away, followed by ‘No Due Date’. Not the most elegant, but sufficient, I hope.

Thanks! That’s helpful. I’ll give that a try. The trade off between ‘Things’ and OmniFocus does seem to be one between elegance and simplicity on the ‘Things’ side and depth of customisation on the OmniFocus side. I hope the developers put in specific days for repeating tasks soon - I use that pretty often.

Have you tried this…under “inspect” you can repeat, say every week, then custom choose the days you want the action to repeat? (If I am understanding your last statement, I think this is already available to you?)

That would be a work around, it’s just that doing that would mean choosing every individual date across the year and then having to re-set the task when those were finished, which is much more hassle than having one ongoing instance.