I would imagine this question gets asked a lot but I couldn’t find an answer. Is there a way to have OF automatically sort the actions in a project by the due date as you enter them, or short of that, is there a keyboard shortcut that would automatically sort them by due date (and put actions with no due date at the bottom)? I know that one can drag-and-drop actions in the order one wants but it’s terribly inefficient to have to drag each action after you enter it. An application this powerful should provide an easy way to do this.
Hi there! OmniFocus doesn’t currently have automatic date sorting directly in projects; for automatic sorting, you’d need a custom perspective.
However, there is a menu option to manually sort by due date. Select the set of actions that you want to sort, then choose Organize > Sort Once > By Date Due. I think this has the behavior that you’ll want: the selected tasks will be sorted with the soonest due dates at the top, the furthest out near the bottom, and tasks with no due date at all at the very bottom.
While OmniFocus doesn’t offer a built-in keyboard shortcut for this action, you can assign one yourself. In System Preferences:
Open the Keyboard pane
Choose the Shortcuts tab
Select App Shortcuts
In that section, create a new shortcut for OmniFocus. Assign whatever key chord you like, and specify the menu item text “By Date Due” for the shortcut. Now, whenever you have multiple tasks selected and you hit that chord, you’ll see the sorting you want. (This works great in conjunction with ⌘A to select all: the Sort Once behavior ignores the containing project, so if you only have one project onscreen, you can hit ⌘A and your custom shortcut in rapid succession to sort the entire project.)
Hope that helps! Also, if automatic sorting outside a custom perspective would be helpful to you, we’d love to know why: you can always shoot our support team an email to explain how it would help your workflow. Thanks for using OmniFocus!
