[drs]

Hi, I couldn't find anything in the help docs that explained how to schedule a task for weekdays only. Is there a way to do this?

Many Thanks,
David

[FMiguélez]

I am not an OF expert yet, but you could try:

- Setting the Start Date of the first task to today, and make it repeat every week. Do the same for each of the other weekdays (so you duplicate these 5 tasks, each repeating every week).
- Since OF's dates are not that smart yet, I just leave this kind of repeating tasks on iCal. Its alarm can send an email to OF. If you set things right, these tasks will appear in OF under the right context, project, and if you want to you can also automatically add flags, start and due dates and estimated task duration. This works especially for the tasks that are something like: repeat on the last thursday of every 3 months, or repeat every Monday and Wednesday, for instance

[Lizard]

There's no direct way to do this, but that is a very popular feature request.

FMiguélez is right, creating 5 separate tasks is one way around this. I take a slightly different approach. For one of my tasks, I just have it repeat every day, and on the weekends I mark it complete without actually doing anything.

[whpalmer4]

Or download Dan Byler's Defer script and when you hit the weekend, defer 2 days.

[drs]

Thanks everyone for your very helpful suggestions.

[santra]

>that is a very popular feature request

This is ridiculous. The user community has been fighting for this FOR YEARS.

OK, as of yesterday, the gauntlet has been thrown down: Things, long maligned for its lack of cloud sync, released a beta with cloud sync that is the fastest, most robust sync I have EVER seen. I mean, INSTANT. OK, on 3G it takes 1-2 seconds. Big deal. On wi-fi, INSTANT.

OmniGroup, what is going on? You're had TWO YEARS to get us weekday only scheduling. Things has had the same amount of time to get cloud sync.

News Flash: Things has won THIS battle. And frankly, I think's it's freaking appalling. Cloud sync—ANY kind of sync—is REALLY hard.

OmniGroup is a large company, and you guys mastered sync and improved it over and over again (quite nicely, thank you), over the last few years.

Now Things, little To-Do kid on the block, finally gets their sync to cloud beta, and it is MAGNIFICENT.

So please please please tell me WHY Things, the tiny company that could, has had WEEKDAY REPEATING almost from the beginning, and GIGANTIC OmniGroup still can't pull off this SIMPLE SIMPLE SIMPLE piece of coding.

Sorry, but I don't buy the "Oh, gee, we have to make sure it integrates with iCal first." Give me a break.

OG, I buy all your products and absolutely love them, but the story of how and why and when this feature will EVER be implemented is a tragedy deserved of a Dickens novel.

:-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-(

Let's get both companies in the boxing ring. Things will show up properly every weekday, as scheduled. OmniFocus will show up haphazardly, if at all, due to scheduling confusion. If the bout had been held a month ago, OG would have a TKO on things every time they DID show up, based on having sync. As of yesterday, it would be a 50/50 odds fight. And on the days that OG didn't show up, due to scheduling problems, OG would forfeit that day and Things would win by default.

Things is gaining on you.

[Brian]

Santra, you'll be happy to know that we've actually been working on this for a while now; an update to the Mac app with this feature should ship fairly soon.

The tricky bit was figuring out a way to implement the feature that wouldn't break the localizations for all the languages we support. Any feature that requires new or changed UI has a much higher cost (both work-wise and financially) than ones that don't. By comparison, changes that don't touch the UI are much easier to ship.

In this case, though, we managed to minimize the effect on the UI. We're not trying to support the full range of repetitions that folks are asking for; instead, if you choose "Repeat every week", you'll be able to pick which days of the week you want that action to repeat on.

Hope that helps.

[dubscg]

Brian,

Any chance we could get an ETA as to when the update will come out? I honestly think the only two things that OF needs to be the "undisputed champ" would be this repeat feature and a new UI similar to the iPad and iPhone. Then its game over. But any update as to a timeline would be great!

Sean

[Brian]

We're the feature's been kicked over to QA, but we don't know how long that will take, or how long it will take to fix any issues the testers find. (Or with any of the other changes in the next release.)

[wilsonng]

Omni has had their hands full with not only OmniFocus but OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniPlan for Mac OS. They also doubled their workload developing iOS versions of these same programs. OmniFocus had to wait its turn in the product upgrade list. Most of their resources were focused on OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniPlan for iOS lately. Then there were some resources dedicated toward bug fixes for the iOS and Mac OS version.

Cultured Code only has Things to work on and it took all their resources to get syncing up and running after what appears to be at least a year if not more.

Omni has been busy churning away at the hamster wheel getting great products out. Now that OmniPlan for iPad has been released, it sounds logical that they'll turn their eyes towards OmniOutliner 4 and OmniFocus 2. IIRC a lot of work in OmniOutliner 4 will benefit OmniFocus 2. So deductive reasoning suggests that these will be the next two major projects to focus on.

Meanwhile it sounds like the internal workings of OmniPlan suggests possible integration between OmniPlan and OmniFocus. Don't know if that's true or not but it sounds like Omni has to figure out a way to get these two programs to play nicely together.

Yes, we'd all want these features ***YESTERDAY*** but programming is not as easy as it sounds. This "simple" piece of coding is but a small gear in the overall scheme of things. It's in the feature request database. You can probably e-mail them to bump it up higher in the request list.

How's this for a news flash? Cultured Code hasn't won anything. I'm glad that
Things is coming along nicely. It provides great competition and we will definitely see these GTD programs leapfrog each other as time goes on. Each program fits different workflows for different people.

I do like some of the UI workflows in Things. But OmniFocus' power still keeps me coming back

At the end of the day, all I really care about is getting my things done. If I do it with Things then so be it. But I still prefer OmniFocus.