[Toadling]

Originally Posted by chrobb

So, to be clear, do you use start dates at all? It sounds like you just use due dates on a small subset of your items, then leave everything else wide open without a start or due date?

Yes, I do use start dates, but almost exclusively for repeating items. For example, I have a repeating project for doing my income taxes that has a start date in February of each year. And the project contains a "File tax return" action that's due on April 15th.

I do have a very small number of non-repeating actions with start dates as well, but I only use them as a way to clear my lists of items that can't be acted upon right now. For example, I have an action to sell some of my stock options set to start in June when the options vest. There's nothing I can do about them now, so there's no point in cluttering my view with the action until then.

Originally Posted by chrobb

For example, if I ask someone to get back to me in a few days, but it's not imperative that they do so, I'd rather not assign a due date to that. How would I go about reminding myself to ping them about it again?

I create an action like "Wait for response from John" and assign it to my @john context. If it's not a person I have regular contact with, and I don't have a custom context for them, I'll assign the action to the context they're most likely to respond in, like @phone or @email.

I then do mini-reviews every couple of days, skimming all available actions for each context (context mode, group by context, showing only available actions). When I come upon my @john, or @phone, or @email context, I'll see that I'm still expecting a response from the person and decide whether I need to do anything about it.

If I'm particularly anxious about the person's response, I might even flag the action so it appears in my "Flagged Items" perspective, but that's rare. And I never assign a due date to the action unless there's really some kind of deadline involved. I suppose I could assign a start date if I know the person is unable to respond for a while (e.g. they're on holiday until the 15th), but I probably wouldn't bother in most cases.

Originally Posted by chrobb

I played with the Review system a bit. The problem I see there is that it's only at the Project level, not the individual task level. This doesn't work well for my idea of using this as a tickler for tasks. I also want ticklers to exist at different intervals, so the Review system ain't right.

Yea, it's only available in planning mode. But you could set the view bar to display only available actions to reduce the resulting list to only the essentials. Not sure if that would help.

Also, each project can have its own review interval, so you have some control. In your example, I might set the review interval to only a couple days so it'll keep popping back to the top of my review list. Other projects that I don't want to be bothered about, I'll set the interval to a couple weeks or even a couple months.

But if you're looking for varying review intervals on individual actions, you're right, OmniFocus doesn't currently support it.