[drmarkhutchinson]

I see this is a hot issue. I really want to prioritise my projects rather than my tasks. Any way I can do this?

I also find I am distracted by the urgent and loose sight of the important in my current use of OF.

Any help here would be awesome

[whpalmer4]

You can reorder your projects in the sidebar, with projects nearer the top having their actions shown before those nearer the bottom.

[R13ckJ]

Hi Ken,

Can you tell me what's latest with tag functionality?

Originally Posted by Ken Case

our plan has been to allow people to create their own columns of metadata, which they can use however they want: with generic tags, or with specific columns for priority, people, etc. (We have this capability in OmniPlan, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle.) We just didn't have time to do it for 1.0, and we won't for 1.5 (which has to focus on synchronization so it can be ready to synchronize with the iPhone).

Hopefully in 1.7.

Thanks

[rjmayer]

Now I appreciate that everybody's needs are different and that a lot of people like to work with priorities, but if I can add my own personal opinion: OmniFocus was conceived specifically for GTD and priorities are not part of GTD. Moreover, it's the very lack of them that makes the GTD paradigm what it is. GTD is not a general term for task management (as I used to believe and I suspect many other people still do), it's a specific implementation of task management - an implementation that purposefully avoids the use of priorities. Priorities simply add a counter productive administration overhead. Put bluntly (but not meant offensively), if you think you need priorities then either your GTD workflow is not in tune, in which case you need to think on a more fundamental level about how to organise your tasks and projects, or you're confusing GTD with classic task management and trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

Drawing an analogy; Classic cake recipe... Butter, eggs, flour and sugar. Sponge cake recipe... Eggs, flour and sugar. Why is there no butter in a sponge cake? Because it's a sponge cake.

And now ask again, why are there no priorities in OmniFocus? Because it's GTD software.

But as I said at the beginning each to their own and I'm not trying to tell anybody that they don't need priorities. As others have pointed out perhaps GTD (and therefore by implication OmniFocus) is just not for you. My message is simply ask yourself what type of cake you're trying to bake? Classic or sponge? Classic or GTD? ;-)

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by rjmayer

And now ask again, why are there no priorities in OmniFocus? Because it's GTD software.

Agreed. Good software has an identity and a purpose, and while I may not agree with all the design decisions around OmniFocus (I'd rather have tags than context, for example) OF does stick to its principles and I can't fault the OG for that.

[NickHibma]

Marking things with some label (priority is a name, for that; colouring or flags another) is actually VERY GTD: just like context, location, energy level, duration, availability, fun-level, etc. custom markings are just a way to slice the way too many todos (1000+ in my case).

Missing this possibility to add MY markings to each todo is one of the reasons why I consider other todo list managers. Many have for example 'tags' which would solve this problem sufficiently for me.

[rjmayer]

Originally Posted by NickHibma

Marking things with some label (priority is a name, for that; colouring or flags another) is actually VERY GTD: ...

Hey Nick, I do agree with you on that. Perhaps it is indeed a tags/label feature that OF is missing, which would certainly be a more flexible solution than explicit priorities.

That said, I'm not personally a big fan of labels. But that's just me, I know. Others are probably more disciplined than me; my problem is that with tags I tend to descend into micro-management. Before I know it, it takes me 5 minutes just to add a new item. And that's actually one of my main reasons for not using other apps.

[NickHibma]

That's definitely true (one of the reasons why I do not use the duration field at all, to time consuming to fill in). I suggest an enumeration of strings in which the user can provide his or her up to 10(?) enum entries.

Examples:

Red (must do), Blue (should do), Green (best effort), Yellow (tinker)
1, 2, 3 or A, B, C (priorities)
Today, Tomorrow, End of week, Next week, This month (horizon)

(prefix digits to make sorting work).

Group by enum entry; sort by enum alphabetically; add another filter to select enum entry.

That would be a natural fit and make my life a lot easier.

(but having multiple coloured flags would do the same (for me)).

[reesd]

Originally Posted by Ken Case

As I recently mentioned in the Tags thread, our plan all along has been to allow people to create their own columns of metadata, which they can use however they want: with generic tags, or with specific columns for priority, people, etc. (We have this capability in OmniPlan, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle.) We just didn't have time to do it for 1.0, and we won't for 1.5 (which has to focus on synchronization so it can be ready to synchronize with the iPhone).

Hopefully in 1.7.

OmniFocus is on 1.10 now so when do we finally get custom columns? As you said you have them on many of your other products. I have been waiting for OmniPlan to add filtering/perspectives or OmniFocus to add custom columns for many years. I find both unusable without it for task management and many other use cases. Sigh.

d

[NickHibma]

Yes, when!?

It feels like the Apple syndrome has hit OmniGroup: We provide great software and the customer should be happy with this feature we just implemented. I paid a *lot* of money for the OF tools (plural), invested a lot of time in them (hello, ninja's) so I expect a decent response to required features like this.


As to the implementation of this 'tagging' feature request:

Adding multiple coloured flags would be a nice first step and trivial to implement. Second step would be a new column for free-form text. Third a column with tags (similar to the project column, but with multiple entries possible). The last step in providing more flexibility could be adding free-form columns.

I am sure that most people would be very happy with step 1. I would be in any case. The last step sounds like way to complicated to me for the bulk of users.


So when, dear Omnigroup, will we get this feature? (YYYY-MM-DD) ____-__-__