Repeating projects and default tasks?
 

Hi!

I'm new to Omni Focus (seems that I'm switching from Things though; OF is pretty awesome ^^) and playing around with it, I found Repeating Projects, Task Groups (did not yet figure those out) and have a question about that:

I want to create a project in a folder, that repeats every month with a set of default tasks. But each month, I will also add new tasks that I probably won't need the following months, thus shouldn't be included in the set of default tasks and therefore shouldn't repeat.

What would I need to do exactly that?

You get greater flexibility by not having the project repeat, but rather having individual actions in the project repeat. That way you can add actions to the project which will not be repeated, and there isn't a problem with the next month's actions not showing up because you haven't completed all of the current month's actions—the next month's actions aren't created until you complete this month's project with your approach. Just be sure to put a start date on the actions so they don't appear before their time, and you'll want the containing project to be either a parallel project or a Single Action List.

Ok, would mean that I would have a never-ending project but I think I can live with that. Thanks :)

Well, there's another way you can approach this, if you want to have a nice set of completed monthly projects. Get Curt Clifton's [URL="http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~clifton/software.html#PopTemp"]Populate Template Placeholders[/URL] script, make a template project with all of the actions you want to do every month (nothing repeating, and a start date for each month's project so it doesn't appear before its time), and use the script to stamp out a year's worth of monthly projects. Each one will be completely independent, so you won't have the issue of the next month's work depending on every bit of the previous month's work being completed. You can add extra actions to any month's project as needed, and an excellent one would be the action to make another year's worth of monthly projects! It does have the advantage that you can see tasks out in the future as far as you've created the projects, which the repeating approach does not support. However, it doesn't handle the addition of associated tasks which might need to be done on a different repeat interval, which is a piece of cake with the never-ending project approach. Of course, there's nothing preventing you from using both approaches in parallel.

Ok - I will have a look at it. Thanks a lot :)