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Is there a way to have tasks show up as available only if they have an available start date set? My next actions all show up as available.



Quote from this post about a Today perspective:
http://j.mp/cbkh6L

"This is the perspective I use in the mornings to work through the day. It lists all projects with tasks available. One of the criteria for a task to be available is that it have an available start date. If you have an item marked not to begin until the next day (or next month), it won’t show up in this view."
 
One of my deeply held beliefs is that you want to avoid putting dates on every single action, if at all possible, and you especially want to avoid changing them over and over.

Now, that said, I can envision a workflow where you only dole out a carefully metered amount of actions and have everything else waiting in the wings. Sort of like having an enormous jar full of paper slips with actions written on them, and each day you pull out a handful and do them. That represents a bunch of fooling around with changing start dates, which I don't personally find to be productive, but you should do what works best for you.

Bring up a context mode view, and group by start date. One of the groups you will have is actions with no start date. You can select that whole bunch (click on the first one's handle, scroll to the bottom, shift-click on the last one's handle), bring up the inspector with cmd-shift-I, and set the start date for all of them to some future date.

Note that an action without its own explicitly set start date is treated as if it has one if the parent (action group or project) has one. If you have a project which has a start date, all of its actions will be filed in one of the start date groups (not the No Start Date one). Due dates and flags also have this same inheritance behavior.

Once all your actions have a start date, if you restrict your view to show only Available actions, you will only see actions whose start date has arrived. Every day or week or whatever you'll need to look over your projects and actions to decide which ones should have their start dates adjusted (or simply removed) to make them available for work.
 
Just to clarify: if an action doesn't have a start date, but an ancestor row does, the action uses that start date.

If an action and all of its ancestors have no start date set, it's treated as available - OmniFocus treats that as "this already started".
 
I don’t think it’s possible without being explicit in start times, but I*would love a "available today" perspective: where it shows items that I had specified a future start date and now that day is here. If there was no date set then it simply would not show up.

Basically an inverted Forecast view borrowed from the iPad. I can see what is becoming available but I’m not inundated with "available anytime" tasks.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by erima View Post
I don’t think it’s possible without being explicit in start times, but I*would love a "available today" perspective: where it shows items that I had specified a future start date and now that day is here. If there was no date set then it simply would not show up.

Basically an inverted Forecast view borrowed from the iPad. I can see what is becoming available but I’m not inundated with "available anytime" tasks.
It sounds to me like you might want to try Bill's suggestion of grouping by start date in context mode.
 
 


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