[Craig]

Here's the idea for creating a Today list in my morning review. It employs the "estimated minutes" field, which to this point I have not used at all.

At the weekly review, I flag tasks and/or items that I think deserve attention during the following week.

At the beginning of the daily review, I first view a perspective that shows all unflagged available actions and flag as many as I feel are plausible candidates for doing today.

Then I view a perspective that shows all flagged available actions with no duration set. This is a master list from which to choose today's actions. I choose ~9 tasks that I see as today's tasks, and for each I enter an estimated minutes (<60). I can then Cmd-K to clean up (ridding the list of the already-chosen today tasks), and then choose three more tasks which I see as "tomorrow" tasks that, if I have extra time, I should start on today. For each of these, I assign an estimated minutes value of 61.

(I should mention that I have an applescript clear all previously assigned estimated minutes values before I do what was described in the previous paragraph, to start from scratch for every morning review.)

Okay, now I should be set. I have a "Today" perspective with these settings:
Mode: Context
Contexts: Active
Grouping: Context
Sorting: Duration
Availability: Available
Status: Any
Estimated time: 1 hour.

With this last filter setting, I think this SHOULD give me just my list of ~9 tasks which have estimates under 60m, i.e. a manageable list of just what I want to get done today.

And then I have a "Tomorrow" perspective which has the same settings except with Estimated time at >1 hour. That successfully brings up those three tomorrow tasks since they were set to 61 minutes.

Okay, here's the problem: that "Today" perspective doesn't work the way I expect. I think it should just show the ~9 tasks to which I have just assigned durations. But for some reason my OmniFocus also shows a ton of tasks for which there is no estimated minutes set.

This seems like a bug to me. Has anyone else come across this? Or have I just misunderstood what the estimated time filter is supposed to do?

I'm excited about the potential of this tweak to my workflow, so I sure hope that this is something that will get fixed. (I have submitted my feedback to Omni.)