Today Perspective Showing Contexts With No Actions

[ambitions2o]

Hi,

I have been running a Today perspective for sometime now and have noticed this before however never have posted about it before.

My Today perspective is calibrated as follows:

The issue I am having is when I click on the Today perspective, the only contexts that should be showing (I would imagine) would be ones that have been flagged or are due. So this is my Today perspective for today. There is one action in there (which has been flagged and should be in there) under the context MacBook Pro : Online. However, if you look there are two other contexts that are listed to the left and do not have actionable items (nothing is due nor is flagged under these contexts).

So I am confused on why they are showing other two contexts showing when they have no actionable items that have been flagged or are due?

[ambitions2o]

Anyone experiencing this also?

[teronel]

I get the same results when I set up a perspective like yours. I think this has been discussed on the forums before, but cannot think how to find those references easily. Suggest you write to omni support. Sorry I’m not more help.

[wilsonng]

I’m guessing here. The sidebar will show contexts even if they are empty. This allows you to drag a task from the main outline to another context. If the context is not visible, you wouldn’t be able to drag and drop.

[ambitions2o]

I can understand that however why only those two specific contexts? All the other contexts are setup with the same parameters and only those two show.

I have reached out to OF about it, I will reach out again.

[wilsonng]

I remembered there was a URL that changed the ability to show or hide empty contexts. A quick search of the forums yielded this thread::

Show up emtpy contexts

Hey there, you're doing relly great support-job in here. And I'am relly sorry about this next question, but: Can you give me a URL to show up emtpy contexts in the side bar (custom perspektive)? => Grouped my Projekt, sorted by due,(..)filtered by active contexts I would love to see all contexts in the side bar. Not just these with actions in it. omnifocus:///change-preference?MainOutlineIncludesEmptyContexts=true (not working)

Go to your web browser (Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) and enter the URL. This should change your OmniFocus settings.

Another thread here:

Empty context titles appearing in perspectives - and how to hide them

Thanks for all the feedback! The change was intended to make it easier to do things like select two contexts in the sidebar and drag tasks between them, and to reduce some other confusion surrounding empty contexts. But clearly this change has introduced noise into some perspectives that really shouldn't have that sort of clutter. Ultimately, adding support for focusing on contexts similar to our support for focusing on projects would help with this problem since you could use focus to do the …

[ambitions2o]

Thanks Wilson for taking a look. I found both of those threads before and tried them, however they did not work. I even went to the length of deleting the customer perspective and trying again.

This is my “Today” perspective so the objective is to complete all the actions on it. Once that is done, the contexts should completely disappear and I can move to the “Contexts” or “Projects” perspective to work on other items. The idea behind the drag and drop doesn’t help here nor is needed so there should be a hidden feature.

[mdbraber]

Could it be that you have “Focus” set to a specific project / folder? It seems that contexts are considered empty if they don’t have actions in any project and don’t take into account your “Focus”