[Craig]

Here's the idea for creating a Today list in my morning review. It employs the "estimated minutes" field, which to this point I have not used at all.

At the weekly review, I flag tasks and/or items that I think deserve attention during the following week.

At the beginning of the daily review, I first view a perspective that shows all unflagged available actions and flag as many as I feel are plausible candidates for doing today.

Then I view a perspective that shows all flagged available actions with no duration set. This is a master list from which to choose today's actions. I choose ~9 tasks that I see as today's tasks, and for each I enter an estimated minutes (<60). I can then Cmd-K to clean up (ridding the list of the already-chosen today tasks), and then choose three more tasks which I see as "tomorrow" tasks that, if I have extra time, I should start on today. For each of these, I assign an estimated minutes value of 61.

(I should mention that I have an applescript clear all previously assigned estimated minutes values before I do what was described in the previous paragraph, to start from scratch for every morning review.)

Okay, now I should be set. I have a "Today" perspective with these settings:
Mode: Context
Contexts: Active
Grouping: Context
Sorting: Duration
Availability: Available
Status: Any
Estimated time: 1 hour.

With this last filter setting, I think this SHOULD give me just my list of ~9 tasks which have estimates under 60m, i.e. a manageable list of just what I want to get done today.

And then I have a "Tomorrow" perspective which has the same settings except with Estimated time at >1 hour. That successfully brings up those three tomorrow tasks since they were set to 61 minutes.

Okay, here's the problem: that "Today" perspective doesn't work the way I expect. I think it should just show the ~9 tasks to which I have just assigned durations. But for some reason my OmniFocus also shows a ton of tasks for which there is no estimated minutes set.

This seems like a bug to me. Has anyone else come across this? Or have I just misunderstood what the estimated time filter is supposed to do?

I'm excited about the potential of this tweak to my workflow, so I sure hope that this is something that will get fixed. (I have submitted my feedback to Omni.)

[Greg Jones]

I expect the problem is with your script that resets the estimated time for all tasks. If your script is changing the time to '0', then the task's time field in OmniFocus will be blank, however it now has a value assigned to it so the task is no longer considered to be unestimated.

[Craig]

Aha, you may be onto something.

Does anyone know what the proper applescript command for removing the estimated minutes would be? Here's what I am using:

set estimated minutes of (every flattened task whose estimated minutes is greater than 0) to 0

[whpalmer4]

Did you try setting it instead to missing value?

[Craig]

Okay, now I've changed it to

set estimated minutes of (every flattened task whose estimated minutes is greater than 0) to missing value

I still am getting some unassigned-duration tasks appearing in that perspective.

[curt.clifton]

I've seen a bug where perspectives don't always update after a script executes. The particular problem I saw had to do with the display of flagged items. Switching to a different perspective and switching back worked around that problem.