Thread: Two requests
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These are a couple of related things I wouldn't mind being able to use in OmniFocus.

(1) Being able to mark an object with an explicit, invariant “Due Soon” and “Overdue” without entering an absolute date. Sometimes, I really don't have an actual deadline, but certain work is inherently due soon or even overdue. This status would not change, that is, the invariant “Due Soon” mark would never change to “Overdue”, it would just stay “Due Soon” until I changed it manually to something else. An excellent way to implement this would be in terms of invariant relative dates (dates that stay relative): invariant “Due Soon” would actually an invariant “due in 2 days”. Allowing invariant Overdues that are invariant “due yesterday” versus invariant “due last week” would be a nice touch.

(2) Being able to mark explicit sequential dependencies between objects such that Object B is blocked until Object A is completed (or deleted), at which point it would automatically become active. If Object B was marked with a relative (but not invariantly relative) date(s), then its date(s) would become absolute. However, invariant “Due in 2 days” would stay as it is, but would start showing up as (e.g.) “Due Soon”. This would allow something to be “Due two weeks after Object A is completed”, and chains of these would really cool for planning. A graphical view of dependencies like Omniplan's Gantt Chart view would make this extremely useful.

In summary, there would be three types of date:
(1) absolute dates
(2) invariant relative dates
(3) blocked relative dates (convert to absolute when unblocked)

Greg Shenaut

P.S. Note that the two kinds of relative dates could be combined, if the “invariant relative dates” were simply “relative dates” blocked with something that will never happen, perhaps a built-in, system-defined “Never” event.