I have been using Omnifocus for a week and truly am loving it and can see how using this program will be very beneficial for me as I am really bad at organizing and procrastinating a lot.

I have build a nice setup and it is 95% there. However there is one thing that bugs me and am trying to find a way around this.

In my perfect Today list, what I want to appear there are:

1) All Flagged items to appear in Today list (without a start date)

2) All Due (and Due Soon) items to appear on Today list

3) All available items to appear on Today list (items that have Start Day set for today or before)

On my Today perspective, I have set Availability to 'Available'. On Status section I have to put 'Due or Flagged' in order to get due and flagged items to appear on the Todaylist as well.

Now the problem is that in order to get my available items to appear on today list (items that have a start day set for today or before) I will have to flag them also. Sometimes I "schedule" my tasks and forget to flag them and they won't appear on the Today list on the scheduled day. This is slightly problematic cause sometimes I forget to flag important tasks, and I use Scheduling / Today list a lot in my methodology.

Now the solutions I can think of are, either automate somehow tasks to flag automatically on start date - or create a status section on the perspective where it would show 'Due or Flagged or UnFlagged'. Then my today list could show items that are either 1) Flagged 2) Due or 3) Have start date today or before (no need for flag).

Any ideas on whether it is possible to achieve this somehow?

[daltongreen]

If you flag all of your tasks without a due date, they still will not show up in the "Today" list until their start date arrives. So, if you have a task that is flagged and is set to start tomorrow, it will not show up in today's "Today" list because it is not "Available." Once it becomes available, it will show up.
I hope this helps.

@daltongreen thanks for the suggestion, anyhow flagging all tasks without a due date would mess up my rule number 1 "show flagged items" (without a start date).

The idea of this is that you go thru your "next actions" list every morning and see if you can add some tasks to what you could achieve today, by flagging them.

If anyones interested, the temporal solution I have created (to not to forget to flag scheduled items and miss them from my Today list) is that I have now created a perspective called 'Forgot to Flag?', which works exactely like my Scheduled perspective, yet it shows only tasks without a flag. So by checking this perspective once a week I will see if I have forgotten to Flag any scheduled items.

One more thing I really hope that Omnigroup could add into Omnifocus is that in my Today list - I want to be able to re-order my tasks!! My 'Grouping' is set to 'UnGroup' and all the tasks are shown in a simple and neat list, yet I cannot re-order my tasks (as it is impossible in Omnifocus to re-order tasks in Context -mode).

I need to re-order my tasks according to the order in which I want to complete them and I find this essential. Currently to achieve this, I will have to write my Today list down onto a paper, in the order in which I am planning to get them done.

Omnigroup, please make re-ordering in context mode possible.

[Greg Jones]

Originally Posted by devastat

One more thing I really hope that Omnigroup could add into Omnifocus is that in my Today list - I want to be able to re-order my tasks!! My 'Grouping' is set to 'UnGroup' and all the tasks are shown in a simple and neat list, yet I cannot re-order my tasks (as it is impossible in Omnifocus to re-order tasks in Context -mode).

I need to re-order my tasks according to the order in which I want to complete them and I find this essential. Currently to achieve this, I will have to write my Today list down onto a paper, in the order in which I am planning to get them done.

I work out of context mode, GTD style, and I also have a need to look at my most important tasks as a priority. Because of this, I've created two 'Today" perspectives. Both perspectives show the same tasks, but differ in how the tasks are presented. The first perspective groups tasks by context and the perspective setting looks like this.



For the second perspective, I use the duration field to assign 'priorities' as I don't use the duration field for its intended purpose. I use the numbers 1-20 and the tasks will sort in that order, and tasks with no duration assigned will appear at the bottom of the list. When I conduct my daily review, I assign durations to my most important tasks rather than assigning a rank to every task.

Rather than assigning the duration as 1 to highest, 2 to second highest, etc., I leave blanks so that I can insert tasks in the rank order during the day, or bump tasks up/down the list without having to change all the tasks. So in the morning my most important task may be a '2' second most important a '5', and so on. The perspective setting looks like this.



The actual list looks like this.


Another bonus of this perspective is that I can play with the duration filter on the View bar on the Mac and focus on the most important tasks on the today list.



The workflow sounds like a lot of work, but I found it very simple and intuitive after using it for a few days. The perspective also syncs to the iOS devices. Beats writing a list down on paper!

Thanks Greg for sharing, that's a very clever temporal solution until omni group makes task re-ordering possible in context mode. Only thing I will really miss in your solution is the possibility to reorder tasks in iPhone/iPad.

[pault6]

Thanks Greg, my weekend browse through the Omni forums often yields a useful tip. Your perspectives hint scratched an itch that I have had for a while. I appreciate your efforts.

[mchapman]

Very sorry for the off topic post. I found your advice very helpful.

But how did you great the list view in OF?

Thanks, Mark

Hi! I'm not quite sure what you are asking, but you might want to check this thread also:
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...=things&page=2

[Yotonka]

Originally Posted by devastat

...

One more thing I really hope that Omnigroup could add into Omnifocus is that in my Today list - I want to be able to re-order my tasks!! My 'Grouping' is set to 'UnGroup' and all the tasks are shown in a simple and neat list, yet I cannot re-order my tasks (as it is impossible in Omnifocus to re-order tasks in Context -mode).

I need to re-order my tasks according to the order in which I want to complete them and I find this essential. Currently to achieve this, I will have to write my Today list down onto a paper, in the order in which I am planning to get them done.

Omnigroup, please make re-ordering in context mode possible.

ReorderIng: context mode, even flagged perspective.... DAMN right!
Do it now! Do it fast!