[rmathes]

sigh.

Yes, I can close the non relevant parts. Again, I don’t want to close them. I don’t want to even SEE them. I want a screen that shows me ONE list of tasks and ONLY one list of tasks, those items that need to be worked on today. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, not next year.

I don’t want to have to close those lists. I don’t even want to see those lists.

Cmon, this is simple. One list. Stuff to do today. Nothing else. Focus. On. Today.

and no, I'm not only working on stuff starting today because, yes, obviously stuff that is overdue would never get done. that would be a wee bit of a process flaw, no?

[rmathes]

one suggestion: perhaps the Focus button could work to help, um, actually focus in on this stuff. Still not sure what that button does, honestly.

If I sort my tasks across all contexts or a given context by due date, I tried highlighting just those tasks due today and prior and then hitting the Focus button. Nothing happened except the toolbar changed.

Would be cool if hitting the Focus button in this case actually made everything not selected visually disappear from the display and combined the selected lists into one list.

[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by rmathes

one suggestion: perhaps the Focus button could work to help, um, actually focus in on this stuff. Still not sure what that button does, honestly.

Focus limits what you see to the folder, project, or set of projects that you select in Planning mode. Once you focus, you see only those projects until you choose Show All. The focus remains when you switch to Context mode, so you can limit visible tasks.

Example: I'm a college professor, and I keep all my teaching projects in a Teaching folder. If I decide that I need to spend the next 4 hours working on teaching, I focus on the Teaching folder, switch to Context mode, and see only teaching-related actions until I decide to Show All.

It would be neat if Focus could work in Context mode too, especially for groupings, but it might make the one tool do too many things.

[rmathes]

Brian, thanks, in a project environment that makes sense.

Would love to see this work in similar fashion in the Context side of things. Let me highlight the today and prior categories, hit focus, then everything else disappears and I just see one list with those tasks. That would work.

[rmathes]

OK, after another day of testing, OmniFocus is simply unusable for me, unless I'm missing something. And it pertains directly to this topic. But it’s even worse than I thought.

So for some, the answer to my quest to just see what I want to see is sort on due, then close the views for everything but what I want to see. The problem is, these selections don’t “persist”.

For example, I'm in the context window. I click on the top level ‘context folder’ so I can see all tasks due today across all contexts. I’ve selected to filter tasks by ‘due date’. So I then minimize ‘next month’, ‘next week’, ‘tomorrow’, etc..., so only what I want to see open remains open.

Then I go to a specific context to see what’s due today for that context and do the same thing. Then I decide I want to go back to the high level context folder. Guess what, none of my selections have persisted, everything is open again, I'm seeing every single task.

I’d love to see my original request implemented, but this? The pain in the butt factor is WAY too high to make this workable for me. Combine this with no intrinsic way to import emails directly into the inbox without the pain of Clipping and I simply don’t have time to use OmniFocus as presently constructed. Maybe it’ll get there shortly, I'll be watching. But right now for my preferred workflow, this app is simply too inefficient.

I think right now the most prudent course of action is to wait for this app to mature some more and see if it gets ready for prime time. Right now it’s promising, but for me it’s just not there, not even close. And with iGTD2 coming soon - and with a far more robust smart folder functionality set - OmniFocus is going to have to really step up from this to make switching make sense.

Bottom line, right now OmniFOCUS just makes me work too hard to actually focus on what I need to get done today.

[sprugman]

I struggled with the Today/Soon/This-Week/After-That issue for a while. (If you search the forum, you'll find a rather contentious thread on the subject.) The system that I've come to, that's working for me fairly well, is to be rigorous about using the "next review" system to keep things alive, using start dates to move projects and tasks out of the active view, and then using the flag to mark things as "Today". I have a "This Week" perspective and a "Today" one . I use these in conjunction with three other perspectives as part of my daily review:

My Daily Perspectives:

Pending: {Planning: Pending Projects, Next Review, Unsorted, Remaining, Any, All}
Active: {Planning: Active Projects, Next Review, Unsorted, Remaining, Any, All}
Waiting: {Context: All, Ungrouped, Due, Remaining, Any, All - Waiting context selected}
This Week: {Context: All, Due, Due, Available, Any, All}
Today: {Context: All, Due, Due, Available, Any, Flagged}

It took a while to get there, but now it generally takes me less than 10 minutes to do the review.

[rmathes]

sprugman......thanks, appreciate you sharing your system.

But what you do is far more work than I have to do now in iGTD. I’m coming at this from a basic perspective: I have an app now that works for me. It has shortcomings (don’t they all?) that I am hoping to see addressed (and iGTD2 appears to be addressing some of my biggest requests) but I can use it to work efficiently.

The only reason I'm demoing OF is because of my tremendously high regard for OmniGroup and their history of building stellar products. I have no doubt OF will evolve into this caliber of an application. But for my process needs, it’s simply not there yet. It’s not even close.

If I have to do half a dozen different manipulations to simply focus in on what I need to do TODAY, then it’s not the app for me. What I find so terribly ironic and somewhat amusing is that for an app named OmniFOCUS, and with such a stated desire to allow users to FOCUS in on what they really need to be working on, making it such a pain to simply see just what I need to do today is startling.

I’m not sure whether this will be remedied in the future or not. Maybe fixing this makes sense to the developers, maybe not. No matter. If they do, I'll take another demo run at this application. If not, I'll continue to use iGTD.

I’m rooting for this app to mature into something highly usable, but right now, it ain’t. At least not for me.

[KiltedGreen]

rmathes - I hope you've sent a Feedback message via OMNIFocus directly to the support guys and linking it to this thread.

I can understand your frustration when you want to do one simple thing and it seems so difficult that there have to be 50 workarounds. And sometimes, these things can be implemented by a programmer in 30 minutes (I know, I used to be one) - but not always ... so it's worth a try.

[rmathes]

good idea.

Done.

[Ken Case]

In the latest build (94868), you can select "Coming Due" from Context Mode's action filter (as an alternative to "Next," "Available," etc.). Does that help?