Pardon the question from a newbie, but I’m having some degree of difficulty understanding repeating tasks and the difference between “Defer another” and “Repeat Every”.
My goal was to simply set up a task that will occur every morning at 7:30am. I went into the inspector and set the task to “Repeat Every” and put 1 day. It scheduled the first occurrence for tomorrow at 7:30 but when I go to my forecast, it doesn’t show up. If I set it up as “Defer another” and 1 day, the same thing happens.
I went ahead and put a due date for today at 7:30 and of course it shows up now on today as overdue. This is good, but still I don’t see the task on any other day. Is this just the way Omnifocus works? The repeating item is not visible until the next day? If so, I question that, because, if I am talking to a person about an appointment or something I need to do, and I have repeating tasks that aren’t showing up, I might make an error in setting that commitment because I didn’t remember there was something or several repeating things on that date.
I’m completely wrong here. Repeating tasks don’t show up, they just have the ellipsis in the bubble. The should also probably show up in the Forecast view as well.
Yes, repeating tasks are created when the current task is completed. That’s simply a function of the way OmniFocus works, and basically the way OF has always worked in that regard.
Personally, I prefer the lack of clutter that this provides, since I don’t have a forecast view filled with a bunch of daily tasks every day. Plus, many of my tasks repeat “after completion” which means they may not be truly ‘daily’ if I can’t or forget to do something on a given day.
I use my normal calendar for things that may block out required time commitments. In some cases, these may still be linked to OmniFocus tasks (e.g. “Work out at the gym”) while in other cases, it’s really not required (e.g. “Take vitamins”).
That said, I can totally see how somebody might prefer it to work another way. You can submit a feature request to feedback@omnigroup.com with your suggestion and see what happens, but since it’s worked this way for as long as it has, it may not be an easy change for them to make – the problem being that the new tasks don’t exist in the database until such time as you’ve completed the predecessor.
An action shows in Forecast on the day it’s due (and the day it’s deferred to, if you have that enabled). So if you select tomorrow in the calendar in the sidebar, you should see actions due tomorrow.
Does this limitation in OF still exist? I understand some people might like it, but there should be more options. I would like “repeat every day” to mean “repeat every day” and not “repeat on the next day only if i click ‘complete’”
I prefer to have an adjustable settings - for instance, a checkbox “Show repeating tasks in Forecast”.
I use Forecast to estimate my future workload - and how can I do it without tasks which are scheduled but not displayed???
Has this been sorted?
In order to see a forecast of the week or month I would need all repeated items in the calendar.
If an item is only repeated after completion it won’t be necessary as I would see it as a new task coming in.
However, if the initial task has a due date, it should be finished on that date and in that case another task would be created and shown in the calendar.
It is normal that things are moving around. Things happen and some tasks are deferred to another date or time, which moves it all around.
How can I solve this?
With a calendar, where day-specific information belongs, and which can be shown in the forecast view.
Seriously, the forecast view shows tasks, the same tasks which are in your lists. Imagine it the other way round. I set a task to repeat every week, and OF immediately creates a task for each repeat. I go to my project, and see a literally infinite number of these tasks, one for every week between now and infinity. This wouldn’t be good.
A calendar can do this easily, because it can limit the number of repeats it shows to only the time period that’s being viewed. But because forecast view is just another way of looking at the tasks in your lists, it’s not feasible to do this without completely redesigning what the forecast view is. For example, forecast view has a box with the number of future tasks in it, and with what you describe, this would always show infinity whenever you had a single repeating task with a due date on it, rendering it useless.
