Use of Dates
 

When I want to set a task to follow up with a person who, say, said he would call back on a given date- do I use start date or due date?

Scott

[QUOTE=Scott Betz]When I want to set a task to follow up with a person who, say, said he would call back on a given date- do I use start date or due date?[/QUOTE]

I'd create an action like "From Bob, call back about the foobar project" with a context of "Awaiting" and the start date set to the given date. That way I can ignore it until the time I expect a call back. At that point it will show up in my next action list and during reviews I can decide whether to add an action for myself "Call Bob about the foobar project".

Alternatively, just stick an all-day event in your calendar for that date saying"Bob due to call about foobar by today" i.e. use your calendar as a tickler file. You can then enter a @calls action to call him, a @computer to email him or whatever.

Thanks for the replies, guys. I should have thought through my question a little bit more. What I really wanted to know is- what, if any, functional difference is there between "start date" and "due date" within Omnifocus?

Scott

[QUOTE=Scott Betz]Thanks for the replies, guys. I should have thought through my question a little bit more. What I really wanted to know is- what, if any, functional difference is there between "start date" and "due date" within Omnifocus?[/QUOTE]

The start date is the date on which an action becomes available. If I create an action today and set a start date of 7/24/07 10:00 AM, it will be unavailable until then. Since I normally create actions in Project view, with Remaining actions visible, but work in Context view, with Available actions visible, that means that my new task won't show up in context view until 10 a.m. tomorrow. (unless I change the filter for context view, of course.)

Due date is when you need the task or project to be done. You can group and sort tasks (or projects, depending on the view) by due date, so you can see what is due soon, or what was due in the past. Several people have suggested that overdue tasks or projects be indicated visually, as they were in Kinkless GTD (the OmniOutliner Pro document on steroids that was at the beginning of OmniFocus).

[QUOTE=Scott Betz]Thanks for the replies, guys. I should have thought through my question a little bit more. What I really wanted to know is- what, if any, functional difference is there between "start date" and "due date" within Omnifocus?

Scott[/QUOTE]

The start date field determines when the action will be visible in your "available" list of actions in Context view.

The due date field indicates the supposed deadline for that task's completion. At the moment, I don't think OF does anything with due dates (except allow you to sort by them). It has been brought up in other threads (and in at least a few email feedback messages) that due dates should be highlighted red or something when the due date passes, but right now, it doesn't seem to do anything.

[edit] You must've hit submit like 10 seconds before me because there's no way it took me two minutes to type this.