[howardtnyc]

Hi! I am having a problem in Omnifocus and trying to figure out if somehow I am doing something wrong or if this is a bug.

So I have a bunch of grouped tasks..like this (hope this comes out looking ok, using spaces to indent)


Financial Planning {project}
Taxes {group}
-File 2008 extension (due 4/15/2008)
- file 2009 Q1 estimated taxes (due 3/14/2009)
- File 2008 final taxes (due 6/15/2009)
-file 2009 Q2 estimated taxes (due 12/20/2009)

Investments {group}
-tasks
Estate Planning {group}
-tasks
etc...


If I go into a context view and filter on "due soon" it shows the tasks that are past due and currently due but not the items that are not yet due. So far so good.

BUT, if I go into a project view, it does two weird things. (at least they seem weird to me)

First, if I use the status filter and filter on Due Soon, *No tasks appear*.

The reason for this is that apparently Omnifocus only looks at the due dates of the groups themselves (in this case my group called taxes). However I'm not really using that group to document "due dates" since these groups (like taxes) have a bunch of tasks with different due dates. Its not really relevant to me to give "taxes" a due date so much as the individual items in "taxes." If I don't give the group a due date, then none of its tasks appear in project views that filter by "due soon" (even if the tasks are due). And if I *do* give Taxes a due date of today or in the past then, *in project views* it will show *all* the tasks in the taxes group if the status filter is set to "due soon" (even those individual tasks that are not yet due). so this isnt what I want either.

(Now I know you might say that I should make "taxes" the project and have Financial planning be a folder but I dont want to do that for some very specific reasons I wont bore you with here...but that doesnt work for me in terms of how I use OF. )

One more symptom in a similar vein. if I group a project view by "due" then an entire project will appear in the "due" grouping if *any tasks* in that project are due soon. So if I have, say, a project with 100 tasks, and 1 of them is due but 99 are not , the project and all its tasks appears in the "due" grouping. (and the project does not appear at all in the "due tomorrow" or other groupings).

Its probably obvious but the behavior that I was expecting and am hoping to achieve is as follows:

1) if I have a project view where I have a hierarchical view of lots of tasks/groups, then if I use the filter "due soon" it shows me only those items that are due (and their parents as needed to show the hierarchy). It doesnt show me tasks that are not due. {optionally, I could live with the idea that if the item's parents are due then the children logically have to be due, but in my case I generally have no due dates specified for the parents which, it seems to me, should mean that the children would simply show as due or not due depending on their individual due dates.}

This is pretty much how the context view works...it only shows the items that are due (when filtering by due soon). But the project view doesnt work this way, at least not as far as I can figure.

2) If I group items by due date in a project view, and I have projects with some "due" tasks and some "not due" tasks (and some not specified) then I'd expect that the same project would potentially be listed under several categories and the tasks within that project that apply to each respective grouping would appear. for example. Say the date today is December 8

Grouped by Due Date

Due Today (today is Dec 8)

Financial planning
- file taxes (due December 8)
Fitness
- work out (due december 8)

Due Tomorrow
Financial plannng
- send paperwork to advisor (due December 9)

Fitness
- buy new tennis racket (due december 9)

Not Specified
Financial Planning
- write a will (no due date)
Fitness
- start a diet (no due date)



Can this stuff be done with OmniFocus today?