Weekly sequential project issues (very simple project)

OmniFocus
#1

Hi, I have a very simple project that’s returning every week. These are the two actions:

  • Write article
  • Publish article

The writing has a due date/time that’s on Friday and a repeating setting of ‘repeat every 1 week’. I’ve setup a defer date of 4 days before the due date so that the task shows up on any given Tuesday.

The publishing has to happen before or on Friday and can happen anytime the writing is done.

How can I setup this project so that I only see ‘write article’ when it’s not done and let ‘publish article’ show up once I’ve marked the writing as ‘done’?

Right now when I mark the writing as ‘done’ the publishing isn’t the Next Action in the project because the writing task stays on top of the publishing task.

#2

It sounds like you should make this a repeating project or action group; that will keep the availabilit /next-ness straight between the actions .

#3

So the downside of that is that I have to mark the project as done after the publishing is done?

#4

Projects can be set to automatically complete when their children are completed, though there is no UI for this in OmniFocus for iOS (yet).

I have a similar item in my own database, “Email OmniFocus meeting agenda” that is due every two weeks and is set up as an action group. All of the prerequisites for emailing the agenda (ie soliciting /generating items and writing it) are children of the “Email OmniFocus meeting agenda” task, and I check it off when I hit “send” on that email.

#5

Thanks, that makes sense 👍. I’ve added one more task (come up with a subject for article) to make it look a bit more sane (just one sub item just looks horrible).

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