Can we have sections, please? Things has them, Reminders has them and they would really help in creating order in longish lists of actions.
Example: Assume my “Today” perspective as 20+ actions. Actions that are important, actions representing calls I have to make, actions at the end of the day, actions on the way home, actions that belong to a particular project, and actions that are errands I want to do during lunch break. And then more actions I need to do before lunch at work and more actions I need to do after lunch at work. I want those sorted by project order.
I want to organize these in appropriate sections so they jump out visually as forming a group. Like in Things. Note this is not “just use tags”. Tags are great but way too hard to read.
Sections could be purely visualization, although it would be probably best to treat them as “virtual projects” or “virtual folders” — meaning actions know which virtual projects/folders they belong to and where in the sort order they slot in. OF could even reuse the project or folder visual language.
For me this is the beauty of OmniFocus, especially its use of perspectives.
Its superpower is being able to show you only what you need at that time.
The night before, I look at what’s due for tomorrow and book time into my calendar. E.g. half an hour to make calls, an hour to run errands. Then at the time I’m due to run errands, I open my Errands perspective and I can only see applicable tasks.
Why would I want to see the errands I need to run when I’m making calls?
This doesn’t work for me because much of my day depends on what’s going on in the world around me. Plans change.
The very job of every to do list in history is to list what you have to do, typically today. Then you work down your way, changing priorities from time to time because, again, unless you live in an OCD world, things change.
This works fine if you have 5 things and becomes tedious if you have 25. Hence my ask to add sections so I can reduce the 25 things back to 5 sections.
It is so basic to me I really don’t understand why OF doesn’t have them when every other task manager does. See Things and Reminders:
Morning/afternoon/evening breakdowns would be nice in forecast. I try not to let my forecast get too crowded, but it does happen and it can be hard to visually parse.
For the example where you want to break apart a project into sections, I’d just use top-level actions and subgroup. You’d still want a different color and margin around the top level actions, I understand.
Multi-select of perspectives would be neat and probably handle the rest.
For the example where you want to break apart a project into sections, I’d just use top-level actions and subgroup.
That’s Project mode. Folders, Projects and Group Actions all make up the one half of OF that is in Project mode, i.e. the perspectives where you Organize “Entire Projects”. The other half are the perspectives where you Organize “Individual Actions”, which you could call Tag mode.
What I am clamoring for is a third mode, “Group” (or “Section”) mode. Groups can be anything and need to be independent of Projects.
This should be all done internally. Ideally just drag and drop actions into sections. Add/delete sections arbitrarily, per perspective. If new perspective, offer to use section membership of previous perspective(s) but still allow manual drag/drop. Just like sorting, which is also specific to perspectives.
Things offers headings in projects and yes having used Things for a year or more before coming back to OF I would agree they are quite useful. In custom perspectives I would think it would be a nightmare and tags just make more sense, doing the job without creating even more “stuff” needing maintenance
Totally agree, sections are there to reduce work and cognitive load, not create more.
All I am asking for is to let me visually group tasks. When I don’t need them, they shouldn’t be there.
