OmniFocus lets me do this with perspectives. My usage: I only want to see my work tasks when I'm at work and my personal tasks when I'm at home. These tags are the main tool I use for my custom perspectives, and these perspectives are what really make OmniFocus work for me. The first 4 are pretty normal, while "shopping" is my shopping list and "reading" is my reading list, something I've addressed at length already. These 6 tags let me quickly filter my stuff into the major parts of my life. Tags, as I use them, are simply used to separate my work into the different parts of my life. I could be more detailed here, but for me I really only use tags and ignore projects almost entirely. This all adds up to an app that has enough control to let me structure my tasks well without adding friction which could discourage me from dumping all of my "stuff" into it. I'm also in love with how you can tell The Omni Group cares deeply about building top-notch iOS and macOS apps as each version of the app works extremely well. I also really like that the app gives me the ability to customize the look and feel to design the sort of task manager that I want, and hide most of the stuff I don't care about. I use OmniFocus for personal and work items, and the app has a few tools that make it much better at doing this than any other GTD app I've used (skip to "Perspectives" for details on this). Today I want to take you on a quick tour of how I use OmniFocus to get my life in order.
In 2019, after finally reading Getting Things Done and having it really click with me, I don't see how I could use anything else in the near future OmniFocus is just so damn amazing. I have a ‘Deferred’ perspective which shows me all remaining actions that have a Defer Date (grouped and sorted by Defer Date), but I rarely use it (usually as part of my weekly review to check what I’ll be able to do in the future).After years of bouncing between task managers, I always end up coming back to OmniFocus. I don’t enable this option - if the rest of my system is working, tasks will either have appropriate due dates, find their way into my priority shortlists, or simply stay available until I pick it. I interpret it as telling me ‘here are the actions that are becoming available today, for your consideration’. The option in the Forecast view to ‘Show deferred items’ is somewhat in contradiction to this. This way you can see all your upcoming hard deadlines. This includes scheduled items in your calendar, OF actions with due dates, and OF actions you have added your Forecast Tag to (‘Today’ or ‘Next’ for example). The philosophy of the Forecast view, as I see it, is to show you everything that you have explicitly put onto your schedule for today and the coming days.
You can of course do this in advance, so that when the defer date arrives, the action pops up in your Forecast or high-priority perspective. For this you should mark the task in some way in your personal system by flagging it, assigning a due date, applying your Forecast Tag, or applying some other tag that you use to determine your high-priority items. They are not a ‘start date’ as in ‘I must start doing this task at this date’. This works but it feels wrong to me that I am marking “vacuum” as something I want to do “next” when I already informed the system that I deferred it to today at 9am.ĭefer Dates in OF control when a task becomes ‘Available’ they can be used when you cannot or do not want to do an action before a certain date. One workaround I found was to use a “Next” tag to explicitly mark tasks you want to show up in the Forecast for today. What am I fundamentally misunderstanding? So I would sit here and plan out the rest of my day and forget that I wanted to vacuum.
My problem is that if I look at my Forecast at this moment in time then I would not see the vacuum task. I also understood that the Forecast view is a planning aid, ie “here are all the things you have to do today and also the ones you have said you wanted to do/start today.” In my mind, if I deferred my vacuuming task to 9am today, then this means I intend to do it at 9am or anytime after, be it today or tomorrow. Maybe I am not understanding the concept of a deferred date and the Forecast view. It’s still in my Chores single action list, but it’s no longer in my Forecast view. This task showed up in my Forecast for today, but when 9am came the task disappeared from my Forecast. My reasoning for using a deferred date is that it isn’t due on that date/time and I could do it the next day or in the evening and so on. I have a task called “vacuum the house” that was deferred until Sunday (today) at 9am, with a repeat of +1 week from completion.
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