Curt, I really like it! I was trying to use due dates - but then of course my "must-do's" get mixed in with my "would-like-to-do's", which make me not know where to start.

Question: in the perspective you described, do you only look at the current items (because its a tickler file) and more or less ignore the stuff that was started 3 months ago?

...and then (another question), lets say an item comes up on your tickler and you decide that you have too much on your plate today, but maybe in a couple days you'll have time. Do you simply change the start date? Or do you check it off (so you know you put it off once) and recreate it with a new date?

-john

Sounds like you are coming from a Franklin background (spent over 20 years there myself). You have a lot to unlearn, or at least I did when I implemented GTD. Try to purge the urge to prioritize tasks for now, and focus on getting a set of contexts that give you manageable "in the moment" task groupings. A key here is to leverage the duration field (time to do estimate), and create some custom Perspectives that exploit these values when in Context Mode.

I have views for Perspectives for tasks requiring less than 30 minutes, less than an hour, less than two hours and more than two hours. Create whatever makes sense for you. These Perspectives really help me focus on the doable given available time and context. From a GTD perspective, the only missing elements are energy (or creativity) level (next "tie breaker), and finally priority (when nothing else can determine what to do next).

[QUOTE=jkrytus;31703]...and then (another question), lets say an item comes up on your tickler and you decide that you have too much on your plate today, but maybe in a couple days you'll have time. Do you simply change the start date? Or do you check it off (so you know you put it off once) and recreate it with a new date?
[/QUOTE]

I use the Note feature to capture things like date created, times deferred, etc. if I'm worried that a task or project might need further consideration because I keep putting it off.

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;30873]

I have a Ticklers perspective with these settings:

Remaining Contexts, Grouped by Start, Sorted by Due, Show Actions with status Remaining, Any Duration, Any Flag Status.

I have the groups collapsed for everything but Started yesterday, Start today, and Start tomorrow. If I want to "tickle myself", I add an action to OF with a start date corresponding to the tickle date. In my daily review I just check my Ticklers perspective instead of checking a paper file.[/QUOTE]


Ah this is excellent. Anyone want to recommend a good icon for a tickler perspective ? I chose alarm clock -- not convinced about that.

Michael

I used a feather. :-)

Unfortunately, my icon is based on a copyrighted one, so I'm not able to share it.

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;67553]I used a feather. :-)

Unfortunately, my icon is based on a copyrighted one, so I'm not able to share it.[/QUOTE]

Ah nice. I am sure I can hunt down one of those.

Thanks - Michael

Just in case anyone comes back to look at this topic. I found a reasonable icon here which is seems to have no copyright issues.

[url]http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feather_150_transparent.png[/url]

Michael

Tickler
 

[QUOTE=Ken Case;30859]If you switch to Context Mode and group your actions by start date, you'll have something that's functionally fairly similar to the traditional arrangement of 43 folders. (But it won't have all those empty folders for days that don't have anything in them.)[/QUOTE]
I created a view for that, however it only shows 'due today', due tomorrow, due next week....

Is it possible to create a view with all the days there are actions defined for that day. That would be great. And If I would be able to see the number of actions for that day, that would be marvalous...

[QUOTE=ddejonghe;69581]I created a view for that, however it only shows 'due today', due tomorrow, due next week....

Is it possible to create a view with all the days there are actions defined for that day. That would be great. And If I would be able to see the number of actions for that day, that would be marvalous...[/QUOTE]

So you want to see groups for today, tomorrow, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, etc. instead of today, tomorrow, within the next week, within the next month, etc.? I'm not aware of any way to do that with the current version, but it would be possible to create an Applescript that could produce such a listing in a file. I find that simply sorting by date is sufficient, though I rarely look ahead more than a day or two in my tickler perspective.

Also, looking ahead can give you a misleading picture if you have lots of repeating actions/projects in that time frame, as the view of the future won't show those actions/projects which are yet to be duplicated by completing the current action/project. If you've got a big task set to repeat every Monday, and you are looking at next Monday's schedule, you won't see that task there if you haven't completed this Monday's instance of that task. Something that repeated every day would show up only once in a week in that future view! OmniFocus doesn't work like iCal does, populating the repeating events in the calendar out as far as the eye can see.

If you want to make a suggestion/request for a change to OmniFocus, your best bet is to use Help->Send Feedback or email [email]omnifocus@omnigroup.com[/email] to get your request into the development database. There's no guarantee that Ken (or any other Omni staffer) even saw your response to his suggestion, much less entered a vote in the database for your request!

I think folks are making this more complicated than it has to be. There should simply be a facility within OF to post reminders, via some sort of alert (e.g. Growl, email message). Some things may not have a due date per se, but you just want it to go away for a week until its really needed.

One post mentioned Backpack's reminders facility. Its one of the only things I like about Backpack -- its very simple and effective. Currently, I find that a few things are falling through the cracks with OF because of the lack of reminders, which is how I think of ticklers.

[QUOTE=hardcoreUFO;70642]I think folks are making this more complicated than it has to be. There should simply be a facility within OF to post reminders, via some sort of alert (e.g. Growl, email message). Some things may not have a due date per se, but you just want it to go away for a week until its really needed.

One post mentioned Backpack's reminders facility. Its one of the only things I like about Backpack -- its very simple and effective. Currently, I find that a few things are falling through the cracks with OF because of the lack of reminders, which is how I think of ticklers.[/QUOTE]


Sure but the reason people are finding more complicated solutions is that there isn't currently the facility you are suggesting.

Michael