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/
