It may not work for your workflow, but it does work for mine, if I see one thing then I know I have one thing to do, if I see 20 then I know I need to do 20 - without clicks. Everyone has their own workflow, there is no right or wrong.
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How do you know you have 20, if you don’t know if all of them have to be done? Not all taks need to be done inside a project. Also, after a certain number, you can’t really see them or count, it gets cluttered. I’m sure you don’t actually do that and use meta tasks.
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Again, this is a workflow set up. For me if a project is due then all tasks inside it are due. If there are optional tasks that can be done afterwards then they go in a companion project, or the tasks that are due are given due dates - depending on the project in question.
You are only forced to do this because of a design flaw, you don’t have other options.
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thank you but I still want to go on with OF for a while. I mean I invested 1 year of time into this app and payed a bit to learn and buy it (pro on OS an iOS). I just hope that OF listens to us. My hope is that they will implement it like they did with multiple contexts / tags. Before OF was very sceptical (and also some people blind for progess and improvement) but I hope that the forums will change their mind. I also think that many people never thought about this “problem” deeply so I hope that our forum will encourage them to write to the support.
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I too did complain about that at first with omni, but:
By project management design if you make a project due it means it is a waterfall project and that is the terminal date of the whole set of tasks. Then you can anticipate that date with earlier dates for specific subproject tasks.
This is not so easy I know.
Personally I never set a due date for a project, only tasks. You can have one task marking the end of the project, name it “end of project” or such, and put a due date on it. Of course that adds project maintenance and human error and that is why at the end if you do not really have hard deadlines, you are better of IMO with not setting a due date on projects.
What we could actually ask omni is to mark due dates as “inherited due dates” when they depend on some higher level due date.
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We think it’s important for OmniFocus to consider child items due whenever the parent item is due:
If all the items in a project aren’t meant to be due, then I’d suggest only putting due dates on the ones that actually are due at that time. If you’re just trying to get a project itself to show up in Forecast, then I suggest applying your Forecast tag to the project: that tag won’t be inherited by child items.
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From a theoretical standpoint, the way OmniFocus currently handles due dates is correct. If a project is a desired outcome that can be accomplished by taking a series of actions, than those actions necessarily inherit the project’s due date.
In your example, if you want to pass your biology exam, then all steps to prepare for the exam have to be finished before the exam date.
What I read between the lines of your request is that you are using the due date field of the project to indicate on what day you intent to study. I think there are better ways to manage big creative tasks, for exmple by adding ‘Focus on…’ tasks to your project and use the flag to indicate your desire to take action today.
I recommend you watch the workflow presentation of Kourosh Dini on the Learning OmniFocus site for an in-depth explanation on how to set op focus perspectives.
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Of course not, you can have tasks “read book1”, “read book 2”, “read paper 1”, “read paper 2”, “redo homework 1”, “redo homework 2”, and you can try to do as much as you can, but you don’t need to do them all necessarily.
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Why can’t we have a “plan to do this date” option, like in Things? Things have dealines (due dates), and regular dates (when I intend to do somehting).
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Correctly, you might decide to discard certain tasks, but that does not matter when talking about due dates. I can’t think of any case in which a task that belongs to a project with a due date can have a due date after the projects date.
If my desired outcome is to pass an exam, reading additional information after the exam won’t alter the results. Therefore, even those tasks that I might eventually not do, will inherit the projects due date.
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The two apps hold fundamentally different philosophies of how to manage tasks.
It sounds to me that your mindset fits with Things better than OmniFocus. Why not use it instead? I understand that there’s a difference in features, but if the fundamentals fit better, you’d at least reduce some of the stress you have now of trying to bend OmniFocus to your will.
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Why are you abandoning him from using Omnifocus, because he is asking for features he knows from other apps? No App is perfect and there are some good and bad things in every app. If he asks for a feature in OF, which is available in another APP that shows his affection to use OF and shows that the desired change would make his experience with OF better.
Also if people like him would not exist, you would never ever have multiple contexts in OF. This was available in other Apps long long before ;)
So lets try not to push away users, who have a fresh mind and are more open to new features, because great things could evolve for everybody.
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I’ve had a good experience using defer as a start date. Actions deferred to a past date do fall out of Forecast, but I have a custom perspective that grabs all Available, Due, and Flagged actions. That works a lot better for me as a “Today” view, and Forecast is still useful for future dates. YMMV.
Thanks Daily, I don’t understand the urge some people have to come here and just say: “hey, the software is what it is, adapt to the software or get out!”.
I’ve been using OF for 5 years. This is the first time I’m changing, and I’m just sharing my pleasant surprise in how another software handle things OF can’t handle. And how I realised my workflow was so straightjacketed by OF that I just noticed this by trying out new software.
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This is exactly what I did in OF, and it doesn’t work, you mix “anytime tasks” (available) with “today” tasks. In this way, you need to forever keep deferring tasks you don’t want to do to keep them out of your perspective.
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The only way to work around this and mimic things is by creating multiple tags such as “today” (which now we can use in OF3 in the forecast), “tomorrow”, “this week”, “next week” etc.
I’m not sure why Tomorrow / Next Week / etc wouldn’t be covered by deferring them to the date you want, but yeah, if you want a Today/Anytime distinction a tag (or flag) is a good way to do it.
Okay, thank you all for writing. I changed my workflow entirely and became much more productive. Struggling with my original problem I searched the web, stumbling across Cal Newports blog. This wonderful blog post changed my mind entirely about productivity and planning: http://calnewport.com/blog/2013/12/21/deep-habits-the-importance-of-planning-every-minute-of-your-work-day/
To keep it short: My Today view is in my Calendar now (Fanstastical for Mac) only with the projects (aka study biology) which has a link to the original project in OF. There I can see what I have to do next. I am doing this for 3 weeks now and I wish I would have done it for the last years! I also want to mention @Kourosh 's blog post on this issue which also helped me a lot regarding the connection between OF and Time Blocking in the Calendar: http://www.usingomnifocus.com/2017/05/on-time-blocking/
I am so happy now and with this technique my problem is solved and I am much more productive.
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I am doing this for more then one year now and it is still awesome. David Sparks also started using this method since a while (he calls it hyperscheduling in his blog or podcasts). I dont know why I did not come up with this simple Idea before… I read a blog post on Cal Newports blog about “time blocking” which was from 2007. Does anybody have resources (blogs, books etc) from earlier dates where the phaenomonen of time blocking is being mentioned in the sence of productivity? Thank you!
As an addendum:
https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2007/12/03/monday-master-class-dont-plan-your-day-with-a-to-do-list/
