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Add items with current or past start dates to my contexts Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I've been trying and trying to make this work and I've been googling until my google is sore and I'm at wits end and ready to ask for help. Here goes.

I have a Work context set up and it shows me tasks that are either due today or flagged. It works great, I love it, life is good. HOWEVER, I can't figure out one thing.... (drum roll):

I want tasks that have a start date that's in the past to also show up in my context, in addition to everything else there. But not ones that have no start dates.

I want to stop doing the whole "make it due as a reminder -> don't really need to do it today -> make it due in another few days dance". All the cool kids are using start dates and I want too also.

Here's how my work context is set up:
- Context mode
- Group and Sort actions by project
- Availability: available
- Status: due or flagged
- Duration: any duration

I love the layout, I love the way groups are separated by that grey bar. I just want to add items with past start dates to this list.

I think what I want is a choice for "status filter" that's basically "Due or flagged OR with a past start date. But don't show me crap without a start date, I don't want it!".

Aside from making each item have a start date of 9/9/2099, and using a project mode perspective, is there any way to do what I'm looking for?
 
The way I'm doing this is sorting my perspective by Start Date. That way you'll have a separate group of actions with start date "any time". It's not really hiding them, but on the iPad or Mac you can collapse that group and ignore it. On the iPhone this isn't working very well because you can't collapse groups there.
 
nicoledb - it looks like that will work but it doesn't preserve the context view that I like.

In that view actions due today are in yellow/tan, overdue actions are red, and I'd love actions that have a start date in the past to show up as blue.

I guess there's no way of doing that?
 
I hope the support ninjaīs will correct me if Iīm wrong, but I donīt think thatīs possible. The way you sort your view you would either have to include items without a start date, or exclude everything thatīs not Due yet regardless of start date.
 
There's no particularly good way to distinguish between available items that have passed their start date and available items which have no start date, unless that is the only characteristic that concerns you.

Now, if you can make some assumptions about which items will have start dates and which will not, you may be able to make some progress. For example, maybe the items missing start dates are all personal tasks, and you don't want them showing up when you are selecting work-related tasks. If you organize your projects so that the personal tasks are in one folder, and the work tasks are in another, you can use the Focus command on one folder, then enjoy a view showing only tasks from that folder. When you construct a perspective, there's a set of checkboxes in the Perspectives window that controls whether or not the perspective restores the selection and focus in place at the time the perspective was created.

Another approach might be to use RobTrew's Where in OF script. You can't use it to construct a dynamically updated view like a perspective, but you can use it to get a more fine-grained search, and invoke it as needed. Run the search, pick a task, do it, repeat. Or run the search, flag a bunch of tasks, do them, repeat. The search script gives you a list of matching items, from which you can select any subset to be viewed in an OmniFocus window. Sometimes that window will include other items (the script cannot construct any windows you couldn't construct by hand) but your matching items will be selected. You can save favorite searches for easy reuse, and you can do boolean combinatorial logic, so if you wanted to frequently search for available tasks with both a start date and a due date assigned, for example, you could do so.
 
 


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