But I do want to schedule my week so that I can make time to DO the things I need to do.
How do you schedule time to actually DO tasks in OmniFocus?
If there’s not an easy way to do it, I may just have to stick with Tick Tick which I am trying out for the new year, but I have invested so much time and effort to try and Learn OmniFocus and actually get any benefit from it that I hate to give that up.
While there are a lot of new features in OmniFocus it seems like it’s got just even more complicated and difficult to use.
You would think that even the most basic task manager would let you easily create a prioritized daily to do list and schedule time to actually do the items on the list.
When I moved away from having a boss (retired) … I stopped using OmniFocus, then Things, and now Reminders. Reminders integrates with Calendar so you can see the tasks there and if you want then use Calendar to schedule items on your “todo” list.
Yes, probably ways in OmniFocus which may be presented. Me … got other things to do, like the “todo list” and other unscheduled but important stuff. Your mileage may vary.
I use OmniFocus as a memory bank to hold the available tasks I want to do. Then I open fantastical or BusyCal and switch to the day view or weekly view. I’ll drag an OmniFocus task to a time slot in the calendar app. Both fantastical and BusyCal will honor the estimated duration field from OmniFocus. The Apple Calendar app will not recognize the estimated duration value.
I can drag a task to the 1 pm time slot and a calendar event will be created there. That’s how I schedule a Do time.
The newly created event will have a URL link that can take you back to the task inside OmniFocus.
Sometimes I’ll just drag a project from OmniFocus to Fantastical to indicate that I’ll be focusing exclusively on this project for a 1-2 hour time block.
If I don’t get a time block completed, I’ll reschedule it to later in the day or drag the time block to tomorrow.
Don’t schedule too many time blocks. I usually schedule one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
You can also email the OmniFocus support within the app to ask for a feature request.
Also, a very easy way to signify the tasks that you intend to do (but are not indeed, “Due”) is to Flag a task. Since you have the built-in Flagged perspective it’s an easy win in this case.
Kaitlin Salze has a great automation which enables you to “schedule” tasks without adding a deadline. It is based on tags. See Scheduling – Kaitlin Salzke.