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What have I got on 6 weeks from now? Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
HI,

I am very new to OF and would like to ask a question. Firstly, I understand that Calendar appts stay in the calendar and tasks remain in OF.

But my question is this:

Just say a client wants to take me out on to afternoon meeting in Feb 11, 2011. I check my calendar and note that there is no scheduled appt's for that day. But for all I know, I may have about 9 tasks schedule for that afternoon also.

Is there an intuitive way I can set up OF so in these situations I can say "OK. I have no scheduled appt on that day but I need to check OF to make sure my afternoon isnt overflowing with tasks"

I hope I have made my query clear :)

Thank you
Kevin
 
Hey Kevin,

Great question! Others may have some suggestions to add, but in OmniFocus for Mac, when you have the Grouping and Sorting filters set to "Due" you'll see all your tasks with due dates collected into 'smart groups'. Checking the "Due within the next Month" grouping (or beyond) will show you the upcoming items. With the due column showing you'll see if you've overcommitted yourself for that day.
 
Do your tasks before they're due.
 
One bit of advice if you're using hollywood's suggestion: be sure you don't have the Status Filter set to anything with the word "due" in it if you are looking out beyond the "due soon" period (defaults to 2 days, set in the Dates & Times part of the Data preferences). Also, for the best results you should view your tasks in Context mode, not Project mode.

For an even more powerful approach, check out RobTrew's Where in OF script, which will allow you to do a search such as:

tasks where (due date ≥ date "2/11/11") and (due date ≤ date "2/13/11")
(to see if there is anything due on that day or shortly thereafter)

or even a more complicated search like:

tasks where ((due date ≥ date "2/11/11") and (due date ≤ date "2/11/11 2:00 PM")) and (estimated minutes > 120)
(do I have anything due before 2PM that day that will take at least 2 hours?)

Finally, one last little "gotcha" to be aware of when trying to decide how much work there is to do on some future date: if you have repeating actions, only the next repeat is present. If you had an action to do some lengthy task at 1 PM every Friday, none of these methods would reveal it until you complete the previous one on 2/4/11. OmniFocus does not do repeating actions in the same way as iCal, where you can see them stretching out into the future. That's an argument for putting tasks that are really fixed in place on your calendar, and using OmniFocus to manage all of the other tasks that may have to be done by some specific date/time, but don't necessarily have to be done at some specific date/time.

Last edited by whpalmer4; 2012-07-17 at 09:29 AM.. Reason: Update link
 
I agree with whpalmer. If there's something you know will need doing on a particular day and only on a particular day, then it would need scheduling. The way I think of this as different than a task, per se, is that the task in this case has a scheduled block of time, whereas usually as task would not.

When the day arrived, it may be that when you could do the task could be different than when it was scheduled, but at least you would have allocated the time necessary and could shuffle things as needed without having overbooked yourself.
 
 


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