Repeating tasks driving me nuts
 

I love Things. It's been my best friend for the last two years and thanks to it I have about eight projects in the air at the same time and I can manage it.

But Things are limited and you often have to do weird work-arounds to make stuff work as you want. The reason why I'm right now looking at Omnifocus is because it seems to be everything I need.

After spending some time with organizing my projects I got this yes-yes-yes-feeling. I'll buy this app right away. This is genius!

But as soon as I started messing around with repeating tasks I felt that I entered a horrible nightmare. I've been watching tutorials, reading posts and I still have no clue what to do.

I have a task that I was to be repeated every day. When I'm done I want to check it and make it disappear. I don't want it to automatically reproduce. Every day I'm steadily working my way down to zero tasks and no matter how I do, my repeating tasks just keep on reproducing.

I don't want to see them! With Things this is so easy and every time a new day starts all the repeating task gets added to the task list again. I check them. They are gone. New day - they are added.

Not possible to do with Omnifocus?

Please help. I've spent four hours trying to make things work and it's pretty confusing to be honest.

/C

I don't often do this as I try to scope out the tasks as separate entries of a project rather than having one all encompassing individual action but the way you could do it is to have a daily repeating task named something like "Work on Project X" with a start date of tomorrow and a due date of tomorrow. Each day you tick it off as you work on it and it will disappear from that days tasks and pop back in your list following day. The start date will keep it hidden until tomorrow.

However when you get to the end of the cycle and the task is fully completed, rather than marking it done, just delete it.

{edit} you also need to use a perspective with the Availability Filter set to only show available to make sure the task is hidden until the following day.

When you set up the repeat, what exactly are you selecting in the inspector. I have many repeats and some that repeat every day. It is certainly possible to have items completed today and not show up on the list until tomorrow.

You need to also have a start date on the action if you don't want the repeat to immediately become available/visible.

Thank you guys for your help :) Really really appreciated.

Although I am amazed by the power and flexibility of OF, I decided to stay with Things. I am sure that I could become a OF wizard one day and I am equally sure that would make me even more productive and stay even more on top of my tasks than I can with Things.

But with Things you never need to worry not understanding exactly what you do. I never ever doubt that when I set a task in a certain way, it will come out right. I know it will. With OF I don't. There are too many views and too much information that needs to be set right in the inspector - and I don't have time to deal with all that. Probably my loss in the long run. But... it's too complicated for me. I'm just after a clever ToDo-list.

Again - thanks for your help!

/C

If you are more task-oriented, Things might be a better solution for you at this time. But if your workflow is more project-oriented, I've found that OmniFocus is the better option.

You'll probably be able to work with Things for now. But life takes you in new directions and you might feel the need to go beyond Things.

I know that I have tried to stay within the boundaries of Things but there were so many workflows that I could do in OF that I couldn't find in Things. At the same time, I do miss the simpler workflow of Things and there are different ways to achieve the same results. Maybe the new OF will provide different features that can match Things. I'm crossing my fingers.

I do see some leapfrogging in the Mac OS X productivity category. OmniFocus and Things will leapfrog each other and this provides good competition for both sides. It is similar to the iOS vs Android competition or the Mac vs Windows. In the end, the customer wins.

I know that Things 2 has been around for a while and it has provided a benchmark for OF to achieve. Hopefully OF 2 will set a new benchmark that Things 3 will match and exceed. Thus, the cycle renews itself once again.


If you are new to OmniFocus, it is a worthwhile investment to look at "Creating Flow with OmniFocus", the "OmniFocus Premium Posts", and the MacSparky screencasts:

[url]http://www.usingomnifocus.com[/url]

[url]http://www.asianefficiency.com/omnifocus/[/url]

[url]http://macsparky.com/omnifocus-screencasts/[/url]

The two ebooks aren't cheap but I think of it as the equivalent of hiring an efficiency expert showing tips and tricks that would've taken you months of self-experimentation.

If I had done the two ebooks and the screencasts earlier, I would have saved countless hours of finding a workflow that worked for me.

I know I've spent enough hours trying to get Things to work and came here. I peek at Things every now and then but I just keep coming back to OF. The three links above helped boost my efficiency on many levels.

Thanks for your perspective - appreciated. Well, to tell the truth, trying out OF opened up my eyes to a different workflow and I have now rearranged things in a much more efficient way - thanks to OF :)

But if I should nail down exactly what I disliked about OF - I must say it was the inspector. Powerful beyond measure - but I felt more like a programmer giving properties to objects rather than desribing my tasks :)

Anyway - thanks again for your thoughts!

/C