[dpvanwormer]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

Setting the start date and due date of a given task to be identical doesn't make any sense to me. Why would you want to do this, or was it unintentional?

I set the start date and due date of some repeating tasks to be identical because I don't want to see them beforehand. I only need to see them on the day I want to do them. (Examples: daily exercise, weekly take out the trash, monthly expense report at work) The task takes less than a day to do, and needs to be done on a certain day. I know that I could put it on my calendar, but I want to see it when I am looking at my tasks for the day.

One issue is that OF does not allow a Due Soon period of less than a day. When I finish my daily exercise in the morning and check it off, I do not want or need to see tomorrow's task immediately. I do, because my Due Soon is set to the minimum (24 hours) - but at least its greyed out on my desktop.

The other issue is that I usually do not want tasks to be overdue at 5:00 am when I just got up. So, even though I have the same start and due dates, I'll leave the start time at the default 12:00 am and change the due time to later in the day - usually 5:00 pm or later. That allows me to see tasks that are due that day to be orange for most of the day to differentiate them from tasks that are already overdue.

[whpalmer4]

I took the previous poster (Carlos-Sz) to mean that he was setting the start and due date and time to be identical, not that he was setting them to be at different times on the same date. I agree that setting a start time for a reasonable hour in the morning and a due time for a reasonable hour in the evening on the same date is a fine practice, and I do it with just about all of my many repeating actions. But if you are doing that, you should be having things show up in the Due Soon smart folder so long as you are looking sometime between the start and due times.

I have a repeating action every day to feed my pets which starts at 6AM and is due at 10AM, repeating daily from assigned date/time. When I check it off today, I do not see tomorrow's show up in my Due Soon folder on the iPod, even though I have Due Soon set to 48 hours. Only when I get to 6AM tomorrow does it put in an appearance on the Due Soon list on the iPod. On the desktop, I'm usually working from a context mode view that is grouped by start or due, and while that repeating action does show up in tomorrow's group, I don't find it to be a big deal because I'm looking at today's group (or yesterday's, or last week's, or ...) and I can just close the future groups to eliminate any distraction, or open it to see if there are going to be any potentially unpleasant surprises.

I guess I'm still puzzled as to how/why Carlos-Sz had things set up that he wasn't seeing them in Due Soon on the iPhone at some point in the day.

[Carlos-Sz]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

I took the previous poster (Carlos-Sz) to mean that he was setting the start and due date and time to be identical, not that he was setting them to be at different times on the same date. I agree that setting a start time for a reasonable hour in the morning and a due time for a reasonable hour in the evening on the same date is a fine practice, and I do it with just about all of my many repeating actions. But if you are doing that, you should be having things show up in the Due Soon smart folder so long as you are looking sometime between the start and due times.

I have a repeating action every day to feed my pets which starts at 6AM and is due at 10AM, repeating daily from assigned date/time. When I check it off today, I do not see tomorrow's show up in my Due Soon folder on the iPod, even though I have Due Soon set to 48 hours. Only when I get to 6AM tomorrow does it put in an appearance on the Due Soon list on the iPod. On the desktop, I'm usually working from a context mode view that is grouped by start or due, and while that repeating action does show up in tomorrow's group, I don't find it to be a big deal because I'm looking at today's group (or yesterday's, or last week's, or ...) and I can just close the future groups to eliminate any distraction, or open it to see if there are going to be any potentially unpleasant surprises.

I guess I'm still puzzled as to how/why Carlos-Sz had things set up that he wasn't seeing them in Due Soon on the iPhone at some point in the day.

When I purchased OmniFocus I was worry about monthly repeating events. In my case the Start is at midnight (default) but Due has a different time (e.g. pay TV cable at 14:00; go to the Doctor at 16:00). Maybe I'm missing something but I can't see a reason to set start date for some days before the due date for such kind of tasks.

After entering all my tasks on the Desktop "Due" folder started to work right away making me thinking everything was fine, that I did everything right.

Just the iPhone application brought my attention to Start date because, for some reason, they work differently. I see something in my Desktop and not in my iPhone. It was confusing.

Anyway, now I understand the problem and everything is working as expected in both iPhone and Desktop versions of OmniFocus.

[Brian]

Sorry for the confusion this caused - the context list of the iPhone application will show a "due soon" badge even when the start date of the actions in question has not yet arrived. That's inconsistent with the way that the Mac application behaves, and with the behavior of the "Due soon" screen you're taken to when you tap that item in the list.

Needless to say, the badge is a bug - I've made a note of this thread in our development database, but folks can also email the support ninjas and mention that they encountered the problem, as well.