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Help! I don't trust start dates or my reviews Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Im trying hard to like, use, and trust omnifocus to help take a load off my mind but I'm not there yet. When I use start dates about half of the time I'm assigning an arbitrary start date just to remove things from my view. Problem with that is when reviewing my available actions every day when picking the most important for that day I get stressed that I'm not seeing everything and possibly passing over something that wasn't previously but has now become important.

I also will regularly do a brain dump and add more tasks and I find myself adding tasks that were already there and hidden due to future start dates.

Not sure how to overcome these
 
If you're not working on a project because it is on hold, try putting the project on Hold. then with the correct view on Omnifocus, it won't show.

Only use Start and finish dates when they're actually necessary.
 
I would just leave more tasks as available, however I have so many tasks and also so many low priority tasks (but I don't want to remove these because I want to remember them) that if I leave more available I have a hard time doing a quick view of picking what is most important each day
 
I reserve "flagged" as an indication that I'm planning to do something today and due dates for things that must be done today.

Then during the day I live with the Status Filter set to Due or Flagged which eliminates all the cruft I don't care about.

This pre-supposes a certain level of sanity in your task database in the first place, which I get to with weekly reviews and a quick daily flagging session for tasks I plan to pick off today. For that I use a Status Filter of Unflagged to see only candidate tasks and flag them accordingly.

As other comments indicated above - if you come across tasks or whole projects that you know you're not going to tackle soon then bumping the start date forward a few days/weeks or putting them on hold means you don't get presented with an overwhelming list of candidate tasks avery morning.

One of the benefits (for me) of a regular review is to remind myself what normally invisible projects/tasks I have so I don't enter things twice.
 
I start to struggle with this from time to time when I get sloppy. The best approach I have found is to keep them all in my Someday/Maybe project as tasks. If I want to start defining them early as projects, then I would mark them on hold as someone else indicated. Start Date I use mainly for immediate things that I just can't do at the moment, not long term deferrals.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by djc225 View Post
Im trying hard to like, use, and trust omnifocus to help take a load off my mind but I'm not there yet. When I use start dates about half of the time I'm assigning an arbitrary start date just to remove things from my view. Problem with that is when reviewing my available actions every day when picking the most important for that day I get stressed that I'm not seeing everything and possibly passing over something that wasn't previously but has now become important.

I also will regularly do a brain dump and add more tasks and I find myself adding tasks that were already there and hidden due to future start dates.

Not sure how to overcome these
I posted more details about the idea of using "on hold" status in this other thread:

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=30842

HTH
 
 


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