[Danworld]

Omnifocus is a great program. It's so good, I'm surprised the government hasn't made it illegal, seems like an unfair advantage. :)

Anyway, here's my question:

The perspective:
Project mode
Availability filter: available
Status filter: flagged


It shows me all projects/single-action-lists containing a flagged task, even if none of those tasks is available. If you expand the projects/SAL's, they don't show any tasks, as is appropriate; but the actual project/sal is still showing up.

It would be preferable to simply show only those projects/SAL's with available, flagged tasks.

Thanks.

[whpalmer4]

I think you want that to be only show projects with actions that would be shown by the availability filter setting. If I'm viewing remaining actions, I don't want it to filter out those which are not available!

Issue goes away entirely if you are viewing in context mode, which is usually better for choosing tasks to work on, as opposed to projects.

[Brian]

In project view, the availability filter refers to actions; it won't filter projects out of view. The thinking behind leaving the empty ones visible is that you may want to add actions to those projects.

You can filter projects in/out of view using the Sidebar filter, but OmniFocus doesn't currently have a setting that does exactly what you're looking for. This isn't the first time we've gotten this feature request, though, so I'll add a note to this thread in the development database item on it. (Request popularity is one of the metrics we use when planning our work.) Thanks!

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by Brian

In project view, the availability filter refers to actions; it won't filter projects out of view. The thinking behind leaving the empty ones visible is that you may want to add actions to those projects.

That's kind of a strange argument, if you ask me (I know, you didn't!): why is it I'm more likely to want to add an action to a project that happens to have a flagged action not yet available compared to one which has no flagged actions whatsoever? It doesn't show projects which don't have any flagged actions.

[Brian]

It is entirely possible that my memory in this matter is in error. :-)

[Danworld]

Ok thanks for the help, so I guess that's just the way it is. Thanks for putting that in as feedback.

"Issue goes away entirely if you are viewing in context mode, which is usually better for choosing tasks to work on, as opposed to projects."

That doesn't really help my situation. I run my business from my laptop with all contexts basically always available. I've messed with classifying things based on mental energy, time, etc. and I haven't found that terribly useful.

But I find OF with project view tremendously useful.

[whpalmer4]

I don't think it matters if you actually use contexts or not. Group by project, sort by project, available actions, flagged actions.

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

I don't think it matters if you actually use contexts or not. Group by project, sort by project, available actions, flagged actions.

This is nice, but the only thing you have then on the sidebar to select from are contexts (because you're in context mode).

[Danworld]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

I don't think it matters if you actually use contexts or not. Group by project, sort by project, available actions, flagged actions.

You lose functionality in context mode. For example:

*As mentioned, you can no longer see your projects on the left.
*It takes subtasks out of their imbedded structure, and you can't add subtasks to tasks.
*Adding new tasks to projects or subtasks becomes awkward.

[whpalmer4]

Yeah, but you also lose most of that when you are only showing a subset of actions in project mode, and that's what you are doing by only showing flagged tasks.