Don't know if you remember an old Mac app called In Control. It was a project management tool that was built around collapsing outlines. Ultrasoft's Brainforest Deluxe does much of what In Control did.

The one thing missing -- and this is the feature that I miss desperately -- is the ability to schedule tasks by dragging the task into a calendar on the same screen.

You could accomplish this in OmniFocus. If you added a view that kept the left column of tasks (the collapsing outline) and added a calendar view to the right sector, users could simply drag a task to a starting point. Then, tasks could also be viewed by calendar --- and changing dates could be accomplished by dragging instead of entering data.

To me, this is a killer feature. Don't know why it has been forgotten in this kind of management software.

[pvonk]

When you mention a calendar, do you mean "hard tasks", events that must occur at a specific time. If so, the reason you don't see this in OF is that OF tries to adhere to GTD. Specific events are for a calendar. Tasks in OF are things to do but that can be done when there's time.

[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by Ron

To me, this is a killer feature. Don't know why it has been forgotten in this kind of management software.

As Pierre writes, it's because OmniFocus is built to follow GTD (Getting Things Done) principles. One of those principles is that to-do lists and calendars are different things. You don't schedule things in OmniFocus the way you schedule them on a calendar. A start date is the date something becomes available to do, and a due date is the last date it can be done (without renegotiating with whoever set the due date), but neither is a day you have scheduled yourself to do things. I can have a task that becomes available February 1 (mail my income tax return) and is due April 15, but I might decide to do it on March 23.

OmniFocus is a flexible application, but it really does have GTD principles built into it.

[Craig]

You can, I've just discovered, drag actions onto iCal calendars and it will create new events with the action's name as the event name. No other info comes with, though. It would be cool if estimated duration was used in this dragging and dropping into iCal (currently it defaults to 1 hour regardless of duration estimate), but maybe that's a limitation of iCal.

[InAccuFacts]

I commisserate. I loved In Control. I understand what everyone is saying about the calendar not being GTD, but it was awfully nice to have all your planning tools in one place!

ds

[Lizard]

I think a calendar *is* part of GTD -- it's just the easy part. There are paper calendars of all sizes and calendar apps and pocket electronic gadgets that have calendar apps. Everyone knows what a calendar is and how to put an event on one in the right place, and how to check one to see if they need to be somewhere right now.

It's the action lists (soft landscape) that are harder to manage. So that's what his book focuses on.

I think that a calendar is still an essential tool for any GTD-er, unless they somehow have zero hard landscape actions. And projects certainly can have a mix of soft & hard landscape events (prepping for meetings, having those meetings, doing work assigned at the meetings). So why not have a way to view everything hard & soft for a project in one place? I think OmniFocus should have better integration with iCal (eg if a task has a start, due, & duration that all match up, sync to iCal as an event, not a to do), have its own calendar view, or both.