Start again after completion
 

Hi guys,

I just want to receive some clarification surrounding the Start again feature in Omnifocus. Here is the scenario that I am having. I have a task for "Check Email" with a start date of today at 8am. I then go to the inspector panel and have it start again 4 hours after completion. This should be how it flows, correct?

8am - Start of "Check email" task
9am - I complete "Check email" and check it off.
1pm - I should see the "Check email" task re-appear.

However, this is what I see.

8am - Start of "Check email" task (for the sake of this test I chose not to do it)
12pm - A new "Check email" task appears below the pre-existing one.

I thought that I should see it re-appear 4 hours AFTER I complete it as opposed to 4 hours after the start time. Can somebody clarify this with me? Thanks.

[QUOTE=rrawb;100288]Hi guys,

I just want to receive some clarification surrounding the Start again feature in Omnifocus. Here is the scenario that I am having. I have a task for "Check Email" with a start date of today at 8am. I then go to the inspector panel and have it start again 4 hours after completion. This should be how it flows, correct?

8am - Start of "Check email" task
9am - I complete "Check email" and check it off.
1pm - I should see the "Check email" task re-appear.

However, this is what I see.

8am - Start of "Check email" task (for the sake of this test I chose not to do it)
12pm - A new "Check email" task appears below the pre-existing one.

I thought that I should see it re-appear 4 hours AFTER I complete it as opposed to 4 hours after the start time. Can somebody clarify this with me? Thanks.[/QUOTE]

You are correct about the meaning of "start again", but I would guess that you had previously checked the task off at 8 a.m. and then created a new one that you didn't check. You might want to view remaining actions instead of available actions so you can see what is added as a new task when you check the old one off.

The first 3 times I tried it didn't work. However, I must note that I was in a custom context mode perspective. When I went to planning mode and did it from there, it seems to have worked in a sense where it will not show a new task if the first one isn't completed.

However, there is one quirk. To do a quick test, i had it start 1 minute after completion. I waited 5 minutes and noticed that no new task appeared which is expected. Once I cleared it out though, I noticed that a new one became available immediately. Cleared that, another new task available. It turns out that it started a new task at each minute, but wouldn't show it until I cleared the original one. In this case, since I waited 5 minutes, I had tasks become readily available upon completion 5 times. On the 6th time, it showed it as unavailable until the minute came up. (I hope you understand what Im trying to say haha)

Anyways, I can live with that since I wont be restarting tasks every minute. If there happens to be a backlog of tasks, I'm sure it won't be as tedious mark them as complete.

The repeating task stuff only creates a new task when an existing task is marked complete. The mere passage of time will not cause another task to be created. If you are seeing something appear out of thin air, without any action on your part, you've simply reached the start date for that action and were in a view where actions which have not yet reached their start date are not shown (showing Available or Next Actions, for example, or Completed). When you mark an item complete, the repeat policy for that item is checked and a new one created if appropriate.

It is worth noting that if you accidentally complete a repeating item and decide you want to undo that action, but rather than use the File->Undo command, you just uncheck it, you will get a duplicate item. This happens because toggling the checkmark does not remove the item created when a repeating item is marked complete. Better to use File->Undo (or cmd-Z) than to repeatedly click the checkbox to avoid such issues.