Due Soon Actions Not Showing
 

I have been following the various threads detailing bugs and workarounds with the OmniFocus for iPhone. I have now managed to significantly reduce the db size which speeds up syncing and launching the application. However, I have noticed what I believe is a serious issue with the listing of actions under Due Soon on the home screen. Any action that has a due date AND a start date do not appear under Due Soon (the actions do appear as Due Soon in OmniFocus on the mac).

If you select Contexts on the iPhone the actions DO appear under their respective headings. I deleted the iPhone data and re synced, the issue was still there. After deleting the start time (on the iPhone), the actions immediately appear under Due Soon (without making any other modifications, so it isn't a filtering issue I don't think).

On the mac, I again added a start date and synced. After syncing the iPhone the actions disappeared from Due Soon.

Has anybody else seen this?

Ok, I think I now understand how this is working. The Due Soon IS filtering the actions. It only shows actions that have been assigned a start date that has already been reached. None of the Context settings (Next, Available, Remaining) appear to alter this.

I'm not sure that this is the right way to present things. I want to see all of my Due Soon actions from the Home screen irrespective of their start dates. Shouldn't that be the difference between Available and Remaining? Or do these settings not affect actions listed under Due Soon on the home screen? I guess that this is more of an issue when start dates and due dates are close together - but they often are.

Thanks
 

Thanks for posting your observations. This has helped me since you've delved into this much better than I did.

:) :p

calumma: Your feature request has been recorded in our bug database. Thanks for the feedback.

I was also confused by this behavior at first, but now I'm convinced it's correct for me. I don't want to see any Actions unless I can work on them right now, and I use the start date to signal when I should be able to get started.

An example: I send a status report at work on Thursdays that needs to be composed & sent the same day, and I don't want it cluttering up my list until I get to work on Thursday.

This seems to me to fit in with the ideas in GTD that encourage use of contexts to hide things that aren't relevant to the current situation. It is particularly important for me in Due Soon, since that's tied in with the "hey, look here" badge on the application icon.

I'm not suggesting that you're doing anything wrong or that the feature shouldn't be added, I'm just wanting to signal Omni that the current behavior is great for me.

It seems a lot of "expected behaviors" depend on whether the iPhone is your only view of your OmniFocus data, or just the 'on-the-go' edition.