Delusional. Not trying to dunk on anyone, just being realistic. OF user since 2008.
I don’t want to post any tasks from my professional life here. Goodness, I posted this as an example of a time management plan for tasks at home. Of course, I have significantly more to do at work. However, for data protection reasons, I didn’t want to post any information about tasks here that mention people or companies.
Of course, I have tons of tasks to complete at the office, and I’m not bad at scheduling them efficiently, quickly, and clearly in iCal. For me, OmniFocus is a task manager, not a time management system. Additionally: I get the feeling that some OmniFocus users here want to manage their entire lives in one system. When I see “Go for a walk” as a task in OmniFocus, I wonder… What’s missing is “Wash your hands,” “Have breakfast,” “Look out the window”…? For me, OmniFocus is excellent task management software, but its concept isn’t suitable for life planning.
Oh shit, I forgot to make myself a coffee today. Why doesn’t OmniFocus remind me that I haven’t recorded a repeat task, “Make a coffee,” with a due date in OmniFocus?
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If I were doing this I’d have these perspectives.
- Must Do: date in range of due date, 0d to 0d (only due dates of today)
- Will Do: is available and flagged, maybe add does not have a due date for today
- Maybe Today: has today tag and is not flagged or has a due date for today
Any of these perspectives could be diced further via tag sort/tag sidebar.
Working from your top perspective, then your other perspectives is a natural way to work in OF. You can’t focus on everything at once, anyway.
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If I were doing this I’d have these perspectives.
Not an option for me. I need to see all “must”, “will” and “could” actions in a single perspective as these change quite often depending on business context. (Actions are never set in stone and their definition tends to change over the course of the day. The world is complicated which is why I need my system to be simple.)
Again, not criticizing anyone here. If OF works for you, good for you!
What I am saying is that OF could be ready for the future if it would open up its stubbornly restrictive query language. Right now it is on a path to extinction I’m afraid. I love it and again have been using it for decades but in the day of Obsidian and Claude Code it is just not up to date.
You’re the one changing your lists; could you switch back to Must Do when you have something to do on that list again?
Are desktop widgets or iPad widgets an option so you can see all three lists?
Hope you don’t mind if I’m more interested in troubleshooting your setup than complaining about OF being a doomed dinosaur…
This seems to me (what do I know?) a case where a Kanban style workflow may help. I struggled with tags forever trying a lot of complex tagging structures and perspectives. I now just use the following
- Planned: for tasks planned for today, maybe routine, maybe one-off but need doing
- Available: things I want to get done, some soon, some may become projects in their own right, but no dates assigned
- Current projects: all tasks within a currently being worked on project, again no dates assigned
- Waiting: Needing a response from someone or a particular circumstance.
- Backlog: effectively a someday/maybe storage bucket.
My “Today” perspective sorted by Tag shows the following:
- Tasks with a planned date of today or within the past week
- Tasks tagged available and flagged
- Any other tasks flagged.
Most projects have a repeating (on completion) task “work on x-y project” at the top, so I simply flag that so I am reminded to focus on that project in my Today perspective.
I have very few tasks with hard due dates, where I do these are flagged.
Every morning I just check a few custom perspectives, flag what needs flagging and get working, minimal maintenance and seems to work.
Not sure if that will help but here it is anyway…
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I be amazed if The Omni Group have the number of searches for its product as one of the factors which they use to measure the success of their products.
Also something doesn’t have to be the best selling product in its sector to be a success.
I suspect that while, of course, they’d like to sell more. Omni are more than happy with the product they provide and they have a heck of a lot of loyal customers.
As I’ve said earlier in this thread. Omni have a product they sell and continue to improve to their own vision. They don’t have to add every feature a customer suggests.
This is in essence my setup as well. What sparked this thread is that I want sections for my “Today” perspective, which, like yours, is tag-based (ie a checklist) and contains tasks that are on my plate today (either planned or due/overdue or flagged or whatever).
I fake this today using a special set of mutual exclusive tags (here: :, then : x where “x” is a section name) see below. This requires that all “Planned” tasks in your parlance have one of these tags so they will show up in the perspective. The perspective lets me collapse sections (like the : Reading section in the screenshot) and I can manually rearrange items as needed (important to me).
However, this comes at the price of some tag complexity (minimized by 2 plugins I wrote but still annoying).
Hence this thread: If OF would be less stubborn about their query capabilities, none of this would be necessary. Opening the query language so I can simply say “give me all tasks that have one of these tags, group them by tag such tag and sort them initially by project” would be a fully backwards-compatible feature that would take an hour to implement using Claude Code while taking a critical step forward towards making OF relevant in today’s world.
Again, the reality is that OF is nothing but a database with a frontend and currently the frontend is nicer and more beautiful to look at than having Claude Code manage my life 100x more intelligently in the terminal. The value-add is the visualization, not the database. And the artificially limiting query interface is the blocker.
Open the query engine, heck, even provide an MCP server instead of spending a year to port OF to the 37 Apple Vision Pro users, none of whom actually use OF, and OF will be actually relevant in today’s market.
It’s beyond me how Omni cannot see that.
I’ve been using tags as “sections” for a while now to organise my day. To get this to work nicely I’ve gone super minimal on tags. The only visible tags I have are (mostly) mutually exclusive time of day tags:
My day perspective is:
(NEXT is my forecast tag)
This gives me a nice clean day view. There are no duplicate tasks, I can re-order the tasks, drag them into another day section etc.
In the morning I look at what’s in here and drag a few items about until the day feels balanced and achievable.
As the day goes on I can adjust and also select a task (in PM, say) hit return and add another task below it as I need.
If I’m concentrating on something I’ll just flip to project mode where I have a more comprehensive structure and maybe use focus.
You may ask: “but what if I have a project where one task is ADMIN and another might be SHOPPING”, how do you do that without tags? If you care I will tell you!
I used to go nuts with tags but generally aggravated myself having to maintain 2 very similar task hierarchies. This is not that!
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This looks like exactly what I do. And like you, I use tags only for sections, Today and people. Tags just create more work.
In fact, I have minimized tasks as well. Most projects consist of only a note that sketches out what needs to be likely done but not more since that tends to change enough that managing tasks ahead is not worth the time. Flexibility matters. Then, when it is time for next steps, I create and track the task.
It’s all about simplicity. I track about 50 tasks/day meaning I’ll look at OF about 100 times/day. At the same time, I want to get stuff done and not waste time on polishing OF, so my goal is to limit OF use to 15 minutes/day. Which translates to about 10s max per glance. That’s the simplicity I need and that’s why I am so annoyed that they don’t support sections when it would be so trivial to do.
Thanks for sharing - I like the idea but it requires a certain amount of effort to maintain this when I use a more automated method using a custom perspective with set times to automatically surface the Day and Evening tasks into separate categories for easy convenience.
I have a Day perspective set to show all between 00:01-17:00, and Evening to show 17:01-23:59. You can play around with this but I eventually updated the Day perspective to be able to catch all previous tasks from falling through the net by adjusting the times to -10 years -17:00.
I also set this for each individual defer, planned and due date so nothing, and I mean nothing slips through the cracks.
Just in case anyone wants to try it it is easy to set up.
Here is my Day perspective;
and Evening perspective
This sounds very much like David Allen’s approach in Getting Things Done. A project is any desired outcome that takes more than one concrete step to achieve, and the most important things are to have (1) a clear statement of the desired outcome (i.e., the project) and (2) one concrete step that is the next thing to do to make progress toward the outcome (i.e., the next action). Sometimes it’s helpful to plan more steps in advance, but often that gets in the way of actually accomplishing something.
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Thanks I didn’t know that - every day is a schoolday! Much appreciated.
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My OF should remind me NOT to drink all that coffee (I drink 5 mugs of coffee every morning) :-)
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