Yes, newly created projects have a review interval set. This value is a bit tricky to change with the iPad*— the Mac has some UI for it, but the iPad does not at the moment.
To change the default review interval for subsequently created projects, see this post:
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost...34&postcount=2
The way review works on the iPad is it only shows you the projects which are due to be reviewed, not all projects. Each project has a next review date, and a review interval. If the next review date is in the future, the project won't be shown in the review list unless you've reviewed the project manually from the project's popup menu. If you start reviewing your projects, and don't get to finish the job all at once, OmniFocus keeps track of your progress so you can resume later.
If you look at your new projects in the review mode (admittedly inconvenient at the moment!) they should all say last reviewed today, review every 2 days (or whatever the default value is), and should appear for review 2 days hence.
There are two basic approaches you can take with reviewing:
- All at once — every project reviewed at the same time and interval (weekly reviews)
- Spread out — different projects reviewed on different days, possibly with different intervals
If you don't have too many projects, the all at once approach isn't too bad and does offer you the advantage of having looked at everything together for the big picture. However, once you get enough projects, finding a block of time and concentration large enough to do a good job on all of them can become difficult. Once you can't do that, you should switch to the spread out approach.
The spread out approach is more flexible and offers some definite advantages, but it can be a bit more work to start up and maintain. It's definitely more work to explain! The underlying ideas are that some projects need attention more often than others, and that a steady, lighter workload of reviews on a daily basis is better than an indigestible lump less frequently.
The idea is each day you will only review 1/n of your projects. If you've got 70 projects, reviewing 10 of them each day is going to be more practical than trying to review all 70 once a week. To do this, starting with all of your projects having the same review interval, you would count up your projects and divide by the number of days over which you will spread the reviews. This number must not be larger than the review interval! Now, you take the first 1/n (where n is that number of days) of projects and review them. The next day, you do the same with the second chunk, and so on.
Once you have all of the projects spread out in this fashion, each day you simply go to the Review view and review the projects shown, tapping the Mark Reviewed button after each one. It is important to do the reviewing every day with this scheme, or projects will start bunching up.
If you want to do a overall review of all of your projects, you can do so by just stepping down the project list in the Project view, looking at each project as you go. If you mark everything reviewed on the same day, you'll have to regenerate the system, and you don't want that.
Now, the real power here is that you can adjust the review intervals for individual projects that need more or less attention. Got a project that is in crisis mode? Set its review interval to 1 day, and you'll be checking up on it every day. Something on the back burner? Maybe every 2 weeks is more appropriate for its review interval. You can use the review as a driving function for making sure projects all make progress (even without associated due dates) if you try to accomplish one task from each project you review (not necessarily during the review itself, but before the next review — pick out a task from the project and flag it, for example).
A clever trick courtesy of Curt Clifton: if you only choose review intervals that are prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, etc.) you'll get the least piling up of projects to be reviewed on the same day. For example, a pair of projects with review intervals of 2 and 5 days will only both be simultaneously due for review every lcm(2,5) = 10 days, whereas 2 and 4 days or 2 and 6 days will be simultaneously due for review every 4 or 6 days (assuming start on the same day in all cases).