Scheduling a task for weekdays only
 

Hi, I couldn't find anything in the help docs that explained how to schedule a task for weekdays only. Is there a way to do this?

Many Thanks,
David

I am not an OF expert yet, but you could try:

- Setting the Start Date of the first task to today, and make it repeat every week. Do the same for each of the other weekdays (so you duplicate these 5 tasks, each repeating every week).
- Since OF's dates are not that smart yet, I just leave this kind of repeating tasks on iCal. Its alarm can send an email to OF. If you set things right, these tasks will appear in OF under the right context, project, and if you want to you can also automatically add flags, start and due dates and estimated task duration. This works especially for the tasks that are something like: [I]repeat on the last thursday of every 3 months[/I], or [I]repeat every Monday and Wednesday[/I], for instance

There's no direct way to do this, but that is a very popular feature request.

FMiguélez is right, creating 5 separate tasks is one way around this. I take a slightly different approach. For one of my tasks, I just have it repeat every day, and on the weekends I mark it complete without actually doing anything.

Or download Dan Byler's [URL="http://bylr.net/3/2008/02/omnifocus-defer-script/"]Defer script[/URL] and when you hit the weekend, defer 2 days.

Thanks everyone for your very helpful suggestions.

>that is a very popular feature request

This is ridiculous. The user community has been fighting for this FOR YEARS.

OK, as of yesterday, the gauntlet has been thrown down: Things, long maligned for its lack of cloud sync, released a beta with cloud sync that is the fastest, most robust sync I have EVER seen. I mean, INSTANT. OK, on 3G it takes 1-2 seconds. Big deal. On wi-fi, INSTANT.

OmniGroup, what is going on? You're had TWO YEARS to get us weekday only scheduling. Things has had the same amount of time to get cloud sync.

News Flash: Things has won THIS battle. And frankly, I think's it's freaking appalling. Cloud sync—ANY kind of sync—is REALLY hard.

OmniGroup is a large company, and you guys mastered sync and improved it over and over again (quite nicely, thank you), over the last few years.

Now Things, little To-Do kid on the block, finally gets their sync to cloud beta, and it is MAGNIFICENT.

So please please please tell me WHY Things, the tiny company that could, has had WEEKDAY REPEATING almost from the beginning, and GIGANTIC OmniGroup still can't pull off this SIMPLE SIMPLE SIMPLE piece of coding.

Sorry, but I don't buy the "Oh, gee, we have to make sure it integrates with iCal first." Give me a break.

OG, I buy all your products and absolutely love them, but the story of how and why and when this feature will EVER be implemented is a tragedy deserved of a Dickens novel.

:-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-(

Let's get both companies in the boxing ring. Things will show up properly every weekday, as scheduled. OmniFocus will show up haphazardly, if at all, due to scheduling confusion. If the bout had been held a month ago, OG would have a TKO on things every time they DID show up, based on having sync. As of yesterday, it would be a 50/50 odds fight. And on the days that OG didn't show up, due to scheduling problems, OG would forfeit that day and Things would win by default.

Things is gaining on you.

Santra, you'll be happy to know that we've actually been working on this for a while now; an update to the Mac app with this feature should ship fairly soon.

The tricky bit was figuring out a way to implement the feature that wouldn't break the localizations for all the languages we support. Any feature that requires new or changed UI has a much higher cost (both work-wise and financially) than ones that don't. By comparison, changes that don't touch the UI are much easier to ship.

In this case, though, we managed to minimize the effect on the UI. We're not trying to support the full range of repetitions that folks are asking for; instead, if you choose "Repeat every week", you'll be able to pick which days of the week you want that action to repeat on.

Hope that helps.

Brian,

Any chance we could get an ETA as to when the update will come out? I honestly think the only two things that OF needs to be the "undisputed champ" would be this repeat feature and a new UI similar to the iPad and iPhone. Then its game over. But any update as to a timeline would be great!

Sean

We're the feature's been kicked over to QA, but we don't know how long that will take, or how long it will take to fix any issues the testers find. (Or with any of the other changes in the next release.)

Omni has had their hands full with not only OmniFocus but OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniPlan for Mac OS. They also doubled their workload developing iOS versions of these same programs. OmniFocus had to wait its turn in the product upgrade list. Most of their resources were focused on OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniPlan for iOS lately. Then there were some resources dedicated toward bug fixes for the iOS and Mac OS version.

Cultured Code only has Things to work on and it took all their resources to get syncing up and running after what appears to be at least a year if not more.

Omni has been busy churning away at the hamster wheel getting great products out. Now that OmniPlan for iPad has been released, it sounds logical that they'll turn their eyes towards OmniOutliner 4 and OmniFocus 2. IIRC a lot of work in OmniOutliner 4 will benefit OmniFocus 2. So deductive reasoning suggests that these will be the next two major projects to focus on.

Meanwhile it sounds like the internal workings of OmniPlan suggests possible integration between OmniPlan and OmniFocus. Don't know if that's true or not but it sounds like Omni has to figure out a way to get these two programs to play nicely together.

Yes, we'd all want these features ***YESTERDAY*** but programming is not as easy as it sounds. This "simple" piece of coding is but a small gear in the overall scheme of things. It's in the feature request database. You can probably e-mail them to bump it up higher in the request list.

How's this for a news flash? Cultured Code hasn't won anything. I'm glad that
Things is coming along nicely. It provides great competition and we will definitely see these GTD programs leapfrog each other as time goes on. Each program fits different workflows for different people.

I do like some of the UI workflows in Things. But OmniFocus' power still keeps me coming back

At the end of the day, all I really care about is getting my things done. If I do it with Things then so be it. But I still prefer OmniFocus.

Pal OS had a very full featured repeating and calendar system for to do's back in 1996. I've not seen anything that even comes close since then. That's over 15 years ago and the programming for Palm OS was done even earlier!

I've been screaming for this request since I first got Omnifocus and I agree, this is or should be a high priority item as it makes OF a lot more useful.

Palm allowed a full range of repeats including saying to repeat every first x day of the month or the first and third or MWF or only weekends or nearly any combination. That robust repeating options are part of what made the original US Robotics Palm systems so good as PDAs!

Please Omni, get the stopgap out ASAP and then fix it to be as full featured as we had in decades past with other devices!

Y'all might be interested in this: [url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=23506[/url]

That is a baby step to the type of repeating actions we need, want and had a long time ago. It's a start but not even close to the power of what I lost moving to OF and iPhone from Palm!

[QUOTE=Oogiem;107571]That is a baby step to the type of repeating actions we need, want and had a long time ago. It's a start but not even close to the power of what I lost moving to OF and iPhone from Palm![/QUOTE]

Maybe you could be helpful and articulate exactly what functionality was most useful in the Palm software.

"Make it what I had in Palm 15 years ago" isn't specific, and it isn't helpful. What specific things do you need, and which of those are the most important?

C'mon, people. Really.

I've done this before but here it is again.

Set a repeat to be any subset of specific days of the week, examples include every MWF, every T TH, only on Saturdays etc. Set repeats to be every weekday or every weekend day or every Sunday or combinations of the above. Set due dates as above.

Set a repeat based on day of month not specific date. Examples include Every 1st and 3rd Tuesday or every 3rd Saturday or Last Monday of the month. Or the first weekend of the month or the last or first weekday or 3rd weekday.

Set repeats based on quarters. So something could be set to be due 4 times a year on the 1st Wednesday of the quarter. Or started once a quarter on the second weekend of the quarter.

Set repeats based on half year items. As above

Setting flexible repeats that include both start and due dates. Start again X days after finish and then due x days after start. Or by the days of the week or by day of month not specific date or by quarter or half year as above. So you could do something like repeat item X starting on the 1st Monday of each month and due 2nd Friday of each month. Or start something first weekday of the quarter and due by the last weekday of the quarter.

As I said it was incredibly flexible and very powerful. Basically any way you could think of how to handle repeating actions was supported.

I miss that. I often have things that used all of the above ways of setting repeats and the OF method is totally inadequate.

Oogiem
I think this feature fulfills the first paragraph of your list. There's now a row of 7 buttons, so you can click on or off any combination of days of the week. (Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding this request.)

We do not consider this to be the full set of repeating behaviors we want to support. It's just one small piece that we could do quickly (started after our most recent OmniFocus iOS release was completed), that would help a lot of people.

Thanks for taking the time to make sure we know specifically which other types of repeats would be most useful to you.

I'll be waiting till it comes out for real, I can;t do sneaky peeks, too risky for my critical OF data but I will be watching for it and will test it.

What about the setting both start and due dates issues? That is such a critical part of setting reasonable repeating actions. I nearly always want something to be both start on X and due by Y and there is no way to do that.

I'm not sure I understand this "both start and due date" issue.

A repeating action can have both a start & a due date. When it is completed, the repeat of the action will have both its start & due date moved forward the same amount.
So if I set an action to start Feb 21 and due Feb 23 and have it repeat every 1 week, the next one will start Feb 28 & be due March 1.

I think it would help me if you could provide an example of the schedule you can't recreate.

Here are several things I can't do:

I need to set something that starts the first weekday of every month and is due 7 days later. Doesn't matter what day of the week or date the 1st weekday is.

I need to set something that starts the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of every month.

I need to set something that starts on the 1st Wednesday of the month and is due the 3rd Wednesday of the month.

Start the 1st week day of the month, due the 4th weekday of the month and repeats once every 3 months.

It's the combination of more flexible date repeats plus start and due dates that is missing. Typical examples include payroll data and tax stuff. Usually it has a cant' start before, is only on weekdays and has a due date some time after. The by date doesn't work because weekends are not counted.

The current sneaky peaks include a very welcome improvement in scripting control of repetition.

(A long-standing bug was that the choice between: [B]Start again[/B] [N intervals] after completion, and [B]Due again[/B] [N intervals] after completion, could be read through the Sqlite cache, but was [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=19277"]neither readable nor writable through applescript[/URL]).

The new scripting interface requires us to specify both a [I]repetition method[/I] [B][due after completion | fixed repetition | start after completion][/B] and a [I]recurrence[/I] string which is described as: [I]The iCalendar (RFC 2445) string describing the recurrence.[/I]

A sample string would be: "FREQ=WEEKLY;BYDAY=MO;WKST=SU"

(Looking for documentation of these strings, I notice that RFC 2445 is an [URL="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545"]obsolete standard[/URL], replaced in 2009 replaced by RFC 5545 ... Is this choice of an older standard by design ?)

[COLOR="White"]--[/COLOR]

[QUOTE=Lizard;107600]Thanks for taking the time to make sure we know specifically which other types of repeats would be most useful to you.[/QUOTE]

In my business roughly 90% of the actions that need repeats are either monthly or quarterly. So the weekly and day repeat stuff will be useful but is only the barest of baby steps to what is actually required for repeats to be robust.

My most critical ones are the repeats of 1st Tuesday or 1st and 3rd Wednesday or 1st weekday start due 4th weekday. The more flexible not related to date or day ones that are based on monthly or quarterly intervals.

And again, it's so frustrating that as time goes on the SW we use is less capable than SW we started with.

[QUOTE=Oogiem;107653]
I need to set something that starts the first weekday of every month and is due 7 days later. Doesn't matter what day of the week or date the 1st weekday is.

The by date doesn't work because weekends are not counted.[/QUOTE]

You need to be more precise about your specifications, I think. OmniFocus does due 7 days later just fine — 7 calendar days. If you want 7 working days later, that's a different specification. Do you propose to use a calendar to tell OmniFocus about holidays and alternative work schedules as well?

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;107752]OmniFocus does due 7 days later just fine — 7 calendar days. If you want 7 working days later, that's a different specification. Do you propose to use a calendar to tell OmniFocus about holidays and alternative work schedules as well?[/QUOTE]

Yes, 7 working days not calendar days. And yes I'd like for OF to have access to a calendar that I can set holidays or other events as exclusion dates.

And again most of my repeating items are on a monthly not a weekly schedule. And the 1st or 2nd or 3rd X of every month are the most useful types of repeats for me.