[whpalmer4]

While duration support would be simpler to add than multiple contexts, it does require reworking the UI for two products (would need to support it on the iPad as well), documentation needs to be updated, etc. As a long-time software engineer, I can attest that many times writing the code was a rather small component of the work required to bring out a new feature! A bit frustrating for everyone...

You do already have the duration information in your database on the iPhone, and you can make some use of it with perspectives. You cannot view it directly or edit it, however.

To make use of the duration estimate field, you need to make a perspective on the Mac that shows actions in context mode, and sorts, groups, and/or searches based on the duration estimate. I've got a perspective I call "Quick Dash" which shows available actions grouped by context, sorted by due date, and selects only those with a duration estimate of 5 minutes or less. Another potentially useful format would be available actions grouped by context, sorted by duration, with duration estimate of 1 hour (which gets everything with an estimate of 1 hour or less) and another one which has the duration estimate of > 1 hour (which gets everything else that has an estimate).

If you make one of these perspectives, but find that the context you are looking at has too many items from which to choose and you really need to know which items have an estimate less than 40 minutes (or any other value that Omni doesn't provide), there's a way to do it that requires a bit of advance planning. Make a handful of actions on the Mac with duration estimates that will give you suitable values. Make sure the name clearly labels the duration attached! Park them somewhere out of the way, with start dates in the future. Now when you need to look at that list and need to draw a line after all of the actions of 40 minutes duration or less, you just change the context of your "yardstick" action of 40 minutes duration and clear the start date. Now, if you have multiple actions of exactly 40 minutes duration, you don't know whether your "yardstick" action is going to be first, last, or in the middle, so if you are concerned about that possibility, perhaps make your duration values for the "yardstick" markers be 1 minute more than advertised. Still not perfect, but the duration estimate probably isn't, either!