"Today" and "Tomorrow" scripts
 

Introducing a couple simple scripts for due-date slackers like myself.

"Today" sets the due date of selected items to the current date. "Tomorrow" sets to tomorrow's date. There's a little more logic to it, but that's the gist of it.

Setting keyboard shortcuts using FastScripts or the like makes it a breeze to assign items to your day's list (if you use due dates for this).

Details and download here: [URL="http://bylr.net/3/2010/01/today-and-tomorrow-omnifocus-scripts/"]http://bylr.net/3/2010/01/today-and-tomorrow-omnifocus-scripts/[/URL]

Thanks for posting those! I've been meaning to do a similar "Next Week" script for some time (maybe next week :rolleyes:) as I have a lot of repeating items set up as a brace of weekly repeats, one for each relevant day of the week. Making lunch for the kid to take to school, making sure he does his homework, etc. As soon as a vacation rolls around, the carefully tuned process goes off the rails and cleaning up is a nuisance. A version of Defer hardwired to do a 7 day delay of both start and due is all it is, I guess.

Have you experimented at all with turning off the auto-save property while the script is running? Curt found it made a big difference in the performance of his Populate Template Placeholders script, and doing so causes OmniFocus to write out one zip file for the entire list of transactions done while it is off instead of one per change, so it lessens the sync workload a bit, too.

Thanks, Bill. (Bill, right?) Even a non-hardwired Defer should do it for you as long as you enter a multiple of 7 as your interval for deferring.

Re: AutoSave: that hadn't occurred to me, although it makes sense that it would improve performance. Interestingly, Curt's latest Populate Template Placeholders script has the Autosave-bypassing code disabled.

Curt, if you're watching this thread, could you comment?

Yep, I've been known to answer to Bill now and then. I do use the current Defer script a lot, but I'm wearing out my 7 and return keys :)

I've been thinking that a "This weekend" script variant might be useful for all the stuff passing through the inbox that I can't really justify taking the time to read or do during the week, but don't want to completely vanish into the reading pile. All pretty straightforward variations on your original theme, of course.

Curt hasn't put out a release of PopTemp since Ken suggested the change. I think there was some flimsy excuse about a day job, or waiting for the Cubs to win the World Series, something like that... :)

Dan,

I haven't had a chance to post the new version of the script yet, but Bill is right about the performance improvements on the Mac side. Timing tests show no practical improvement on the iPhone side.

The pertinent section of the updated script is:
[CODE]
set will autosave to false
my replacePlaceholders(theTask, thePlaceholders, theReplacements, dateDifferential)
set theNote to (stripPlaceholders of me from theNote)
set theNote to (my replaceText(theNote, thePlaceholders, theReplacements))
set note of duplicatedItem to theNote
set will autosave to true
[/CODE]

One potentially important difference between our situations is that my script is creating entirely new projects and actions. Therefore I don't have to worry about merging changes from edits on the iPhone side. I'm not sure what effects you would get from turning off autosave if some of the tasks changed by the script had pending changes on the iPhone side. Thorough testing is in order.

(The updated populate script is coming Real Soon Now®.)

Cheers,

Curt

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;71769]
Curt hasn't put out a release of PopTemp since Ken suggested the change. I think there was some flimsy excuse about a day job, or waiting for the Cubs to win the World Series, something like that... :)[/QUOTE]

Day job, yes. I'm patiently waiting on the Cubs, but life must go on in the very long interim. (37 days until pitchers and catchers report. This could be the year!)

You raise some good points, Curt. I haven't been too bothered by performance to date, but I'll definitely have to look into this as time allows. It's unfortunate that these performance tweaks aren't actually time-effective—but now that it's on my radar it'll bug me until I fix it...

To be clear, the performance is outstandingly better on the Mac. On a big template project, the updated PopTemp script is a couple of orders of magnitude faster.

Bill--I finally got around to making the "this weekend" script. [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=16496"]Here's[/URL] the thread.

Curt, thanks for your autosave comment... I've incorporated into the current versions.