Sort by Due Grouping Behaviour
 

Does anyone know how the sort by due date behaviour is supposed to behave? I have a perspective grouped & sorted by due date, and have noticed a bug (feature?) in the placing of actions in 'due within next week' behaviour.

As an example, today is 22 Jan, and I had an action marked as due today. Realising that I will not be able to accomplish the task, and it having a date I could move, I moved it to Sunday, 24 Jan.

After changing the due date, the task was placed in the 'due within the next week' section of the perspective. Now I would define 'due within the [I]next[/I] week' as something due in the next 7-13 day period, not something due in the next two days. 'due [I]this[/I] week' would be 0-6 days from now.

A bit of experimenting shows that this seems to happen when an action crosses the Sat/Sun threshold, which makes me think that OF is using calendar weeks and not relative weeks to determine these groupings.

I, like 99% of the world, start weeks on Monday and weekends are, well, the ends of the week, so if as task is due on Sunday, it's due on the last day of [I]this[/I] week (assuming that OF is using calendar weeks).

I'm not sure if this is a Monday-Sunday calendar issue, or something else, but I thought it worth checking here to see this is something configurable, or if it's a bug/feature:

Are the 'due within X' groupings configurable?
If not, how is a 'due within' grouping determined?
Are the 'due within' groups relative or calendar based?

If they are calendar based, the week boundary should follow the preferences.

Cheers,
- Steve

Just a quick thought: could this be confusion over the difference between "next week" and "within the next week (i.e. within the next seven days)"?

Events due [I]next week[/I] would first appear on Monday (if your week begins on Monday).

Events due [I]within the next week[/I] would first appear today and then the next 6 or 7 days, whether those days fall within this week or next week.

OmniFocus does the latter. Does that make sense?

I've long thought that that grouping should actually be called "Due Within the Next 7 Days" to help avoid this confusion. This same issue has come up before.

-Dennis

PS - Sorry if this isn't actually the source of the issue you're seeing.

[QUOTE=nunez;72136]
After changing the due date, the task was placed in the 'due within the next week' section of the perspective. Now I would define 'due within the [I]next[/I] week' as something due in the next 7-13 day period, not something due in the next two days. 'due [I]this[/I] week' would be 0-6 days from now.
[/quote]
I'm pretty confident that if I told you at 2 PM that a certain task was due in the next 20 minutes, you would agree that such a statement meant that it needed to be done no later than 2:20 PM. Similarly, if I told you at 2 PM that it needed to be done in the next 3 hours, you would agree that it needed to get done no later than 5 PM. So why would you interpret "in the next week" to indicate a span of time with a gap of up to 7 days before its start? Why would you want the meaning of the display groups to change depending on where in the week you are?

[url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=8340[/url] contains a previous discussion of this topic. Summary: "in the next week" != "next week" and the current behavior is deliberate.