[ext555]

it's true that you have to " bastardize " the "coming due " function to see what's due today etc ...
I think , if you're trying to understand the logic behind OF you have to keep in mind that GTD is based much on review and "Overview " as D.A. puts it " seeing it all " or whatever context project you choose to focus on . I sometimes have " focus " issues , so I find it helpful to export a list of selected tasks to an app like Omni Outliner [if you use it ] or Task Paper by HogBaySoftware . The other thing you can do is flag " today's " tasks and filter by flagged .

I don't depend solely on " due date " for choosing what needs done today .. sometimes I know today is the day to deal with X.. so I flag it and work on it and keep it's original due date [if it had one }

[rmathes]

see, these are the responses.

‘yeah, I kinda want to see some variation of that, too, and to do it I do these 5 different things and then I can almost get what I want.’

I don’t want to use the flag for today’s tasks, that’s not what the flag is for. That’s what DATES are for. If I use flag for that, then I can’t use it for anything else. Same thing with ‘coming due’. And exporting? Are you freaking kidding me? Talk about the tail wagging the dog. If I have to export ANYTHING to see what I need to see and to do what I need to do, it’s the wrong app, plain and simple.

Don’t make me do 4 different things that are not the natural, organic uses of the function in order to simply focus ON WHAT I NEED TO DO TODAY. Just let me freaking focus on what I need to do today.

Seriously, this is so simple and straightforward that to not have it is just stunning to me. It’s like a car without a steering wheel. How do you design a task management app and not provide this ability to focus in on what you need to do today and ONLY today?

I love the folks at OG but this is a dropped ball I hope they pick up. And the answer ain’t artificially manipulating other functionality.

You know what I have to do in iGTD to see what I need to do today and only today? Click on one smart folder. That’s it. Done.

I ain’t exporting a thing, I'm not using flags, I'm not using coming due, I'm not setting 5 different things and then watching the view change every time I navigate away from and back to that screen. This is just silly.

[ksrhee]

Originally Posted by rmathes

see, these are the responses.

‘yeah, I kinda want to see some variation of that, too, and to do it I do these 5 different things and then I can almost get what I want.’

I don’t want to use the flag for today’s tasks, that’s not what the flag is for. That’s what DATES are for. If I use flag for that, then I can’t use it for anything else. Same thing with ‘coming due’. And exporting? Are you freaking kidding me? Talk about the tail wagging the dog. If I have to export ANYTHING to see what I need to see and to do what I need to do, it’s the wrong app, plain and simple.

Don’t make me do 4 different things that are not the natural, organic uses of the function in order to simply focus ON WHAT I NEED TO DO TODAY. Just let me freaking focus on what I need to do today.

Seriously, this is so simple and straightforward that to not have it is just stunning to me. It’s like a car without a steering wheel. How do you design a task management app and not provide this ability to focus in on what you need to do today and ONLY today?

I love the folks at OG but this is a dropped ball I hope they pick up. And the answer ain’t artificially manipulating other functionality.

You know what I have to do in iGTD to see what I need to do today and only today? Click on one smart folder. That’s it. Done.

I ain’t exporting a thing, I'm not using flags, I'm not using coming due, I'm not setting 5 different things and then watching the view change every time I navigate away from and back to that screen. This is just silly.

I think we got your point. Please stop ranting on the forum. We know how you think the program should behave, and I'm sorry it doesn't behave the way you want it to. There are some of us who think the program behaves the way we would like to at this point, and please give the Omni folks some slack. I have used other programs that I thought should behave in a certain way, but I can't expect to have everything the way I want it. It sounds like you like the way iGTD works and version 2 is just around the corner, but of course, OF works in a different way, and I think that's better for the users as well. If every program works the same way, then we as users will have fewer choices.

One thing I like OF is that it offers enough flexibility to customize the screen the way I want to see the information.

Initially, I also wanted to have specific time-based filters (e.g., such as today, etc.), but then I realized that I was flipping through today, overdues, and next 3 days just to see what I need to be working on now in other programs anyway, and with OF, I can see them in one screen, and that has saved me a few times recently since I would have missed some important future tasks if I was looking at only due items for today. If I don't want to see certain areas, I can simply collapse the outline, and I think once the bugs for the perspectives are all ironed out, the filtering system is going to be extremely powerful.

Yes, focus is important, but only focusing on certain things has its own limitations. OF to me provides much more feature-rich and customizable way for me to get things done.

Just another thought on this matter.

[rmathes]

point taken.

But I do see a theme in responses on this and other threads. Let’s take 4 other pieces of functionality and twist them into a knot to do something pretty straightforward.

Look at email. People pretty obviously want the ability to just dump an email into the inbox. Clipping is fine for what it does, but if that’s the only method you’ve got, you have a very inefficient method (time-wise) to process your email inbox. So people are running around putting scripts together and trying all kinds of different things.

I think OmniFocus has TREMENDOUS potential and out of the box it will work beautifully for a lot of people. But I think the folks at OG need to take a step back and look at basic workflows and ensure their product efficiently supports basic process flows.

This app is beautiful, and what it does it does very well. It’s just missing some stuff that is kind of mystifying.

[ksrhee]

Originally Posted by rmathes

point taken.

But I do see a theme in responses on this and other threads. Let’s take 4 other pieces of functionality and twist them into a knot to do something pretty straightforward.

Look at email. People pretty obviously want the ability to just dump an email into the inbox. Clipping is fine for what it does, but if that’s the only method you’ve got, you have a very inefficient method (time-wise) to process your email inbox. So people are running around putting scripts together and trying all kinds of different things.

I think OmniFocus has TREMENDOUS potential and out of the box it will work beautifully for a lot of people. But I think the folks at OG need to take a step back and look at basic workflows and ensure their product efficiently supports basic process flows.

This app is beautiful, and what it does it does very well. It’s just missing some stuff that is kind of mystifying.

I would agree. BTW, clipping w/o selecting text is coming in OF. I got this working great in my version. See below from Tim's post:

I've got this working, at least in an experimental and unfinished state.

To enable it:

- Turn on some defaults in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles -bool YES
defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniFocus InstallOmniMailMessageServiceEnabler -bool YES

- Relaunch OmniFocus; this will install a symlink in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/OmniMailMessageServiceEnabler.mailbundle

- Relaunch Mail to load the new bundle

Your clipping hot key should work for messages selected in the top table now.

NOTE This has only been tested on 10.5. Also, I've noticed a bug in Mail (grr) where image attachments only come through if they are in a forwarded message (no idea how they managed that).

[rmathes]

cool to see this is coming.

One suggestion: provide a preference on how OF handles incoming emails. For example, do you want OF to become the active app? Do you want to see the quick input dialogue? Or do you just want it dumped into the inbox?

I can see people wanting one of those three and hating the other two behaviors. Make em preferences.

Me? In iGTD I have it set to just dump it into the inbox. I don’t want any interruptions, I'm just trying to plow through my inbox. So all I see is a growl notification that it made it there. It allows me to process my inbox (email) very quickly. If I have to stop and interact with a quick entry dialogue every time, that would slow me down by at least a factor of 2.

Apps like this are a godsend to those of us dealing with mountains of email. It’s our only viable path to ‘inbox zero’, so the leaner this process can become, the better.

[ksrhee]

Good suggestions.

I made a request to bypass Quick Entry as well since I'm so used to entering new items to OF via Quicksilver while working on other applications.

[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by rmathes

But I do see a theme in responses on this and other threads. Let’s take 4 other pieces of functionality and twist them into a knot to do something pretty straightforward.

You may not have meant to refer to my reply when you identified this theme. But just in case: I don't see how having a list of your overdue, due, and soon due actions, sorted and grouped by due date, in which you can hide everything not due today, involves any "twist[ing] into a knot," unless you have decided in advance that the iGTD paradigm is the only way to go. It seems to me just to be a different UI path to the same result.

[rmathes]

brian...yes, among others.

Because, for example, the ‘coming due’ functionality is not necessarily designed to show me what’s due today, but what is ‘coming due’, right? But for me to artificially drive the preference setting as low as possible so that I can try to not see too far into the future in that respective view (respective perspective?) is using that feature for something other than what it is, at its core, designed to do, and now means I can’t use it for that purpose.

I’m doing it to compensate for a shortcoming elsewhere in the software.

It’s not a natural use of that feature, it’s an artificial and contrived one to get a result that should be organically available through other means. And even then, it STILL doesn’t achieve my desired result.

It’s not an iGTD issue. It’s a personal preference issue and one that bugs the hell out of me whenever I work with a ‘task management’ app that doesn’t do it. You can’t get much more basic than asking the question “what do I need to work on TODAY”. And in my opinion (and admittedly, that’s all it is, but I think it’s a pretty reasonable one), the application answer to that question should be to provide me the option of seeing those tasks and ONLY those tasks, not including ones I need to see tomorrow but not today, next week but not today, or next month but not today.

That ANY task management app would not make such a view easy and organic is, in my opinion, ridiculous and a serious design shortcoming. Just my opinion. Doesn’t need to be anyone else’s.

[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by rmathes

Because, for example, the ‘coming due’ functionality is not necessarily designed to show me what’s due today, but what is ‘coming due’, right? But for me to artificially drive the preference setting as low as possible so that I can try to not see too far into the future in that respective view (respective perspective?) is using that feature for something other than what it is, at its core, designed to do, and now means I can’t use it for that purpose.

I'm with you until the "artificially" part. Why not just collapse the part of the outline that goes beyond today? If you group by Due, it's trivial. If it really distracts you to see those collapsed "Tomorrow" and "Within the next week" headings, then how do you deal with the other distractions of a windowing operating system?

Your insistence on purity of function above all else puzzles me. Have you never used a screwdriver as a chisel?

There's a bigger question there too. OmniFocus was inspired by GTD, and in GTD, the answer to the question, "What do I need to need to work on TODAY?" is rarely only "those things that are due today." After all, you might have a slew of minor tasks due today but your quarterly report is due in a week and you need seven days to do it. Concentrating on the urgent can lead you to neglect the important. It might be more important to renegotiate today's deadlines in order to meet the critical deadlines next week. That's especially important for those of us knowledge workers who have long-term but critical projects (like my next book) that can easily get delayed because of impending deadlines on less important projects.