Showing Start Date items in Perspectives?
 

To organize tasks which I aim to complete today, I've created a Today perspective which consolidates any actions which have a status of either Due or Flagged -- I'm using the 1.8 sneaky peeks. I'm in the camp that uses Flags to set actions I want to work on that day.

The only crack in this workflow I've found thus far is items with a Start date are not showing up in my Today perspective, which does make sense as they don't have Due dates but not in the sense that they are items which should appear in a Today-type perspective on a particular day.

If I flag the action upon creation, the action will show up when the Start date hits, but is there a way to get it to appear in my Today perspective automatically, as if it had a Due Date?

Instead of trying to jam everything into one perspective, just use two. I have one that shows "urgent" stuff -- group by due, sort by due, close the groups for all but Due Today and Due Tomorrow. I use 24 hours for my Due Soon setting. I have another that shows my "tickler" file -- group by start, sort by due, and again most groups closed except for the present. Knock off the stuff on the "urgent" list for today, then work the flagged items and tickler list as time permits.

Let me start by saying that I don't think there's any easy way to do what you're looking for within OF itself, since none of the views do any filtering based on start date -- only sorting and grouping. I suppose it would be possible to write an Applescript that run each day and flags all of your items with today's start date, but I'm not sure whether anybody has done that, or if you'd want to go that far.

For my workflow, I just do a daily review each morning in context view and flag those items that I feel need attention today. This also helps me quickly review all of my available actions in each context, and of course I can skip over contexts that I know I won't be "in" that day.

Once my daily review is complete, I work primarily from my "Today" perspective, which is an ungrouped listing of all tasks that are available AND due or flagged. I still select specific contexts as required to filter my today list further and if I'm still physically or mentally stuck in a specific context after completing all of those flagged tasks, I switch back to my "tactical" perspective which shows all available tasks in that context so I can see what else I can do while I'm there.

As I thought about this more, what I really needed was a perspective which highlighted those Start Date items just enough to keep 'em from falling through the cracks. Whpalmer4's suggestion does just that.

Thanks, both of you.