Who wants to be teased? (OmniFocus 3 for iOS Test flight preview)

How do you like the change over to tags thus far? I’ve always wanted context to stay the same but then add tags as a new field. Now, I’m fearful that the change to tags alone is going to eviscerate the concept of contexts altogether. On the other hand, when 90% of one’s work happens on a computer and between iPad, iPhone, and MacBook Pro one always has a computer, the whole concept of context may already need some rethinking.

The overarching question, for a GTDer, is what means do we have of batching similar work. Just because you can do everything on a computer does not mean you can easily jump from one computer task to the next. And, to circle back to the beginning of this meandering post, is a tag the chariot that will take us where we need to go?

It really hasn’t changed my workflow much. If you want to use a single tag only then that will still work. What gets interesting is when you can do with it in perspectives. Now you can have other “contexts” or tags that can mean energy (high focus, brain dead) or use it as a temporary disposable label for quick and dirty perspectives.

I might have a task called “Work on my term paper” with a tag of “@Mac” and “@High Focus”. I can have a perspective that looks for all “High Focus” tasks or all “Brain Dead” tasks. But the task also has the tool tag of “@Mac”.

Personally, I’m still using a single tag/context. But I know I can add multiple tags. I’m still leaning more towards using it occasionally and not for every task/project. I don’t want to go hog-wild and put more than 2 tags to a task/project. That’s just too much work.

Re-arranging tag order might be something worth exploring but it’s still in the early test stage.

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Have perspectives been updated to support filtering and grouping with tags? I’m curious if the following is possible:

Given a set of traditional location-based tags:

#Location
-> #Office
-> #Home
-> #Errands

And a set of energy-based tags:

#Energy
-> #High Focus
-> #Braindead

Could I set up a perspective that filters on “Tags include #Office” and then have the perspective “Group by #Energy”. This will let me see all my office tasks grouped based on the energy/time I have at a given point in time.

Another alternative view using this capability would be a perspective with a filter on flagged (or a #Today tag), that then groups on #Location. This would let me open the perspective in the morning and see all the important things I need to do today, and where I need to be to get them done.

Thanks,
Ed

yes, it certainly looks possible to do this.

But I don’t know if I want to go crazy tagging everything. I’d say put a tag such as “high focus” or “high energy” to certain tasks. Everything else that doesn’t require high brain power would not have an energy tag. It is automatically considered a “low energy” or “low focus” task.

If I’m brain dead, I already know that I’m not looking at “high focus” tasks. I’ll instinctively go for anything that doesn’t have “high energy” tags. But I have refrained from energy tags for now. If I have low energy, I’ll have some stretching and aerobic office exercises to get the blood running. A power nap also works wonders. Then I’m not as concerned about doing “high focus” tasks only when I “feel like it.” I’ll naturally be the laziest person in the world and will procrastinate on “high focus” tasks.

In recent Twitter news, Ken Case says that more wannabe TestFlight pilots will be coming on board soon! Good luck!

Thanks, but that’s not quite what I was hoping for. It looks like that perspective is grouping on Tags, but not a specific set of tags. As a result, there are some additional groupings in the perspective that are showing duplicate tasks. A quick glance at this perspective makes me think I have 5 tasks I want to get done at the office, but you have to walk the whole list to realize there are only 3, it’s just that the grouping shows some tasks multiple times.

I was hoping by selecting the tags for grouping, I could see three groups with your example, without groups for additions permutations:

High Energy

  • Re-pack miniature glasses

Low Energy

  • Find map of warehouse

None

  • Reprice glass flower tree case

I’ll have to wait until I get access to the beta and play around with this more, and then perhaps start a separate thread on this.

The current perspective settings still doesn’t have fine grain control and is on the dock waiting to be retrofitted. Things such as logical conditions (and/or) are being discussed and we might possibly get what you’re looking for. It’s still TestFlight and some features such as delegation and nagging reminders are set a little further into the future.

This was what I could get as close as I could get. Just waiting for Omni to get to work on it but Tags has taken a step forward.

I had the view settings focused on my office tags (office and office:warehouse) and my energy tags (high energy, low energy). So it is a subset of my tags.

Thanks for the additional info - looking forward to when I get a chance to play around with this further. I realize it’s still early and there a lot of things to implement/change. Just wanted to get some ideas out for consideration while it’s still early. :)

hoping for a better way to use tags and custom perspectives at the same time… crossing my fingers.

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@timstringer posted a new video screencast at his web site and on YouTube. Take a peek at a walkthrough where he takes you through some of the new features waiting for some new TestFlight invitees.

https://learnomnifocus.com/omnifocus-3-for-ios-beta-video-tour/

Thanks Tim for the walkthrough.

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One of the things I like about Todoist is that their “perspectives” (or filters as they call them) can be arbitrary expressions or queries.

One of mine is: “!@Routine & (7 days | overdue)”

Which means anything not tagged with “Routine” that’s due in the next 7 days or overdue. It’s pretty flexible but not perfect. I’ve come across some simple things that seem inordinately hard, they don’t have the concept of a start date and there’s no way to specify sort order or grouping. For me OmniFocus wins on points here.

Their notation is described here: https://support.todoist.com/hc/en-us/articles/205248842-Filters

I like the idea of going beyond the restricted status/availability/context combinations that OF perspective filters provide but I don’t know how many people would want that kind of scary power feature.

Maybe that’s something that could be opened up with the javascript API at some point, by having a perspective filter that calls out to a function that decides what to include. That would be infinitely flexible but possibly horrendously slow.

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thanks for this psidnell and for the link. really appreciating it. to be honest, i found a lot of useful things but was wondering if you don’t mind asking me questions in case i would have some? i’m just new here… this post was meant to psidnell.
i was wondering what updates it brings? TestFlight is something new for me by the way.

You can see the new features coming in OmniFocus 3 in the 2018 Yearly Roadmap post.

Just listening to the OmniFocus podcast on tags (while walking the dog and posting this - who says men can’t multitask).

They just said Ken was looking at adding some kind of expression syntax into perspectives.

Just tripped over a kirb.

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You’ll have to join the OmniFocus Slack channel and see Ken Case’s image showing a sample of a conditional perspective editor that he was working on.

It’s in the #omnifocus3_test Slack channel that is publicly available to people who join.

https://omnigrouphq.slack.com

For others who haven’t listened to the podcast, it is over here:

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