[jdh]

One feature about OmniFocus on the iPhone that continues to be extremely annoying for me is its insistence on showing all dependent tasks under the "Due Soon" or "Overdue" headings, regardless of whether they are available or not.

I have a number of projects that have multiple dependent tasks which all need to occur within a relatively short time frame (ie, on the same day). These are "hard landscape" projects, so I generally set a due date on the project itself. The problem is that each week when they become "Due Soon" my item count on the "Due Soon" listing and the OmniFocus icon jumps from zero to over 100 items.... Further, the "Due Soon" view becomes completely useless, as it ends up being a flat list cluttered with unrelated items that don't even appear in any meaningful order.

While I could go with a less granular approach for these projects, that kind of defeats the purpose of a proper GTD system, and particularly of using OmniFocus' excellent outlining capabilities.... If I was going to stay with a flat system where projects were represented by single tasks, I'd likely be using another task management app.

I would really like to see the Due Soon, Overdue and even Flagged categories take a very different approach from the current one. For the purposes of discussion, I can see one of several different possibilities:

• Display (and count) only available actions on these lists. If I have a project with ten steps, there's no point in seeing that the 9 steps I can't perform yet are going to be "due soon." This could be an option to switch between "Available/Remaining" in much the same way as the Projects/Contexts views work.
• I'd argue the same should hold true for the Due Soon/Overdue item counts shown in Context view -- the count shown beside each context should respect the context filter under the app settings. So in other words, if you're filtering by "Available" then the count should only show available items.... I don't see the point in displaying a count that does not correspond to what the user will see when they drill down into the context -- that just makes the software way more confusing than it needs to be as the user is left scratching their head as to why they're told that they have more items "Due Soon" then they can actually see.
• Display a hierarchical project list under these categories, so at least the due-soon/overdue/flagged items are displayed in their proper organization, as opposed to a massive flat list that is generally useless.
• Further to that approach, I'd also suggest taking the due date or flagged status from the appropriate level -- if the project is flagged or has a due date, highlight and count the project entry rather than all of the tasks within the project (since it's the entire project that's due). If specific items have a different due date, or are flagged separately, then it might make sense that they should also be displayed individually, but IMHO it doesn't make any sense when they're simply inheriting the project settings.

I'm posting this as a thread rather than submitting direct feedback (which I've also already done) in the hopes of facilitating some discussion. There may be a better way of doing this that I haven't thought of, but what I do know is that the current method makes no sense for somebody with large multi-stage projects as it dramatically inflates the due item count.... If that's the way it's going to remain, I'd rather turn off the Due Soon/Overdue categories entirely and suppress the count badge from the home screen icon.