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A Perspective Containing a Focus *AND* the Inbox [Feature Request - email support] Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I'm open to alternative ways to manage this, but just now what I'm trying to do is:

- create a perspective with a focus (I have a "work" and "home" folder structure, so imagine this is for "work")
- other normal perspective criteria (flagged, due soon etc)
- i find at this stage the context-based perspective gives me a great list of what I need to be working on now
- but I would also like to see the Inbox contents

Why would I like to see the Inbox contents? Well I pick up a lot of actions through the day that I hammer in with quick entry, I don't want to spend the time categorizing them as I go, but some need to be *done*, the rest get categorized and sweeped at the end of the day. Even if I flag actions as I enter them (easy enough with keyboard shortcut), because of the focus ignoring the Inbox, they don't show up in the Perspective flagged criteria.

If I remove the focus from the perspective I can basically get what I want but now I have my work/home separation messed up.

Any ideas (*) are welcome, thanks!

(*) for instance if I quick entry all items into a pseudo-inbox within the focus, it all works fine, but this is inelegant and inconsistent as I need to remember to do it.
 
I assume this is a Project mode perspective, right? If so, it's a piece of cake: you just need to set up your focused window, then cmd-click on the Inbox in the sidebar to add it to the view, and save the perspective. Make sure sure you have Restore Focus and Selection checked in the Perspectives window. An example:



If you want a context mode view instead, you can accomplish that similarly. You'll want to make sure both the No Context and the Contexts hierarchy are selected in the sidebar (assuming you want all of your Inbox items to show up—many probably won't have a context set).
 
@whpalmer4

This looks great - the Project CMD-Click works a treat but I have a Context-based perspective.

> If you want a context mode view instead, you can accomplish that similarly. You'll want to make sure both the No Context and the Contexts hierarchy are selected in the sidebar (assuming you want all of your Inbox items to show up—many probably won't have a context set).

When I try your suggestion there, the Inbox items do not get added (they have no context), perhaps because "No Context" has already been "focused"?
 
OmniFocus was originally coded up to treat the inbox as a place for items you wanted to remember, but hadn't actually decided for sure that you wanted to work on. Hiding those actions in context view was regarded as a feature, in other words, because it prevented distraction from the tasks you had decided you wanted to work on.

We've been backing off of that gradually over time, but it looks like this is one case where it's still being enforced - if a view is focused, Inbox items won't show in Context view.

We've got a feature request filed on changing that - interested parties should email our support folks & ask to be attached to that request. (Items with more customer interest tend to get higher priority.)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian View Post
OmniFocus was originally coded up to treat the inbox as a place for items you wanted to remember, but hadn't actually decided for sure that you wanted to work on. Hiding those actions in context view was regarded as a feature, in other words, because it prevented distraction from the tasks you had decided you wanted to work on.
Yup, makes perfect sense, I'm a bad GTDer and need to process (and not forget actions between review cycles). I can see how it would be a good design decision originally.

Optional inclusion would be fine - the project focus+inbox technique was kinda cool (if hidden).
 
These days (OF 1.8.2) OF includes actions from the Inbox in context mode views unless you set an option to make it otherwise(*), and as it turns out, I use that option. Rather than turn it off, I made a quick test case with the default database in a new account to verify that you could do the context mode case as I claimed. Unfortunately, while I managed to get the Inbox showing up, I didn't notice that I lost the focus and got all of the other data, as would have been more apparent with my own database. Sorry about that!

(*) See here: http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost...9&postcount=13

If you don't need to do the focus thing, though, you can get the Inbox contents in your context mode view now. One quick hack you could do if you really want to hide the other folder's worth of stuff: mark the folder(s) you don't want in view as dropped.
 
a) In project mode when focussed, items in the inbox remain visible.

b) In context mode when focussed, items in the inbox (i.e. with No Context) don't show up - even though "No Context" is visible at the top of the context list.

I'm trying to make sure that all my perspectives (both project and context) always show inbox items - filters permitting, but in context mode I just can't get this to work if I have any focus set. I can see a case for allowing/disallowing focus to include the inbox but this isn't quite doing either.

When setting focus In project mode, when you focus on a project and the inbox it lets you, but you can't focus on the inbox alone. The inclusion of the inbox when setting focus has no effect, since it's always visible anyway.

Is this a bug or a feature?
 
Quote:
a) In project mode when focussed, items in the inbox remain visible.
That is only true if the Inbox is selected in the sidebar.

While I would be the first to agree that there are a number of spots where the Inbox seems to not be treated quite as I would expect, if viewed from the notion that context mode is intended for working on the tasks you've already processed, the absence of the Inbox tasks in your scenario is perhaps understandable. Of course, this breaks down if you don't go along with the GTD notion that you shouldn't be working out of your Inbox...I'll confess to occasionally doing a bit of that, but the "handle" I use to grab those tasks is a due date, so they show up in Forecast view on iOS, or my Urgent perspective on the Mac, which includes all actions grouped by due date, including those with no context set. That perspective when synced to iPad turns up a different view of the issue: even though I've included the No Context bin in the perspective, the actions in the Inbox don't show up.

I run with "require both project and context" on my Inbox settings, and always have; it's possible that some of these issues aren't relevant if you use other settings.

OmniFocus 2 will be all shiny, and we won't care if stuff like this is still present, right? :-)
 
If you select the inbox and several projects in the sidebar, the text in the
View -> Focus
menu item includes the project names but omits the inbox. I'm interpreting that to mean that the behavior was intentional at the time this was coded up.

That said, I'll make sure a feature request gets filed on this so the team knows you'd like to see the app handle this differently, psidnell. Thanks!
 
Aha, and an existing feature request links back to a previous thread on this subject. Adding psidnell to that feature request and merging threads...
 
 


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