[eurobubba]

Originally Posted by Brian

I find that I get more done overall when I only put due dates on things that were truly do-or-die deadlines. Things I truly need to do get assigned an appropriate deadline, but things I only want to do will get flagged. I grab from the latter list as I'm able once the stuff on the first list is dealt with...

I haven't quite found a way to do it yet that feels natural — probably some kind of "tag" in the notes field — but I do think it could be useful to track "soft" deadlines separately from "hard" ones.

Any chance we might get OmniOutliner-style arbitrary custom columns in some future version of OmniFocus? That way we could add our own columns for a "soft deadline" or any other metadata the individual user finds useful. (Contact links come to mind. Sure, we can just dump everything in the notes field already, but more structured containers are often easier to work with.)

[psidnell]

I've just changed the way I use due and flagged which may be helpful.

Until recently I used to have my "due soon" time set to a week.
This was just a knee jerk "seems right" decision I made years ago
and I've never revisited that particular setting.

But I've always been slightly overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that
shows up when I look at my contexts with a "due soon/available" filter.

I'm now experimenting with reducing my "due soon" time to just 24
hours and generally using a "due or flagged/available" filter
instead. This obviously limits the view to what I'm dealing with
today/tomorrow - but that's generally what I want.

To avoid being surprised by things, I've created an Upcoming perspective
that I check regularly (daily in the morning) that lists all available/due
(not quite the same as the built in due which lists all due) and flag
things I want visible more than 24hrs in advance, possibly adding a start
date if I don't want them visible right now - if it's two weeks away for
example. The iPad/iPhone forecast view is a nice alternative.

This is all pretty basic stuff I suppose, but it does cut down the volume
of clutter I see, and as a consequence of this I can get away with
fewer contexts - I did have too many as a way of coping with the volume.