OmniFocus Sub-Projects/Sub-tasks in Context/Forecast/Flagged view

As part of any given project I may have a substantial number of largely identical parallel tasks with sub-tasks. More specifically it might look something like this:

Study (Folder, large, long-term)
    Data Collection (Project, One part of Study)
      Participant 1 (Action Item)
          Schedule Interview Date (sub-item)
          Conduct Interview
          Transcribe Interview
          Send Transcript to Participant for Review
          Revise Transcript
      Participant 2
          Schedule Interview Date
          Conduct Interview
          Transcribe Interview
          Send Transcript to Participant for Review
          Revise Transcript
...
      Participant N
          Schedule Interview Date
          Conduct Interview 
          Transcribe Interview 
          Send Transcript to Participant for Review
          Revise Transcript  

I have the STUDY as a folder. DATA COLLECTION is a project within that folder (among other tasks that comprise the STUDY).

Top-level “Participant X” actions are not dated but some sub-actions (e.g., Schedule interview date, conduct interview) are dated. Some may be flagged because they need attention, and some may have a tag added if they are being delegated to one of my work study students.

The issue is that when viewed in Forecast, Flagged, or Tag views, sub-actions appear abstracted and do not appear to belong to a specific participant. For example:
06%20AM
In this image, I have three top level Participant actions flagged because they need attention. The first available sub-task (Parent tasks are Sequential) is Transcribe Interview. But now I end up with “Transcribe Interview” from three different top level Participants flagged, but I do not know what top level action they belong to.

Things get even sloppier in Forecast. Here’s today’s forecast:
19%20AM
While I have the calendar event with the participant’s name showing up here, if that wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have any idea which top level action these upcoming actions belong to.

The solution, I hear you suggest, would be to give my top-level Participant actions a due date. But the issue with this is that, at least in the case of participant interviews, the variety of sub-actions all take place across a rather long (and highly variable) timeframe, and in some cases don’t require a due-date.

Another option I suppose would be to include the participant/parent action name in sub-actions but that makes it hard to streamline copy/pasting tasks or templating.

I do imagine there’s some other way of structuring my projects and actions that would avoid this, but it’s just not coming to me.

Anyhow, I hope this describes my system and dilemma sufficiently. I look forward to your suggestions! Note that I am using OmniFocus 3 Standard on macOS and iOS.

This is one of my huge gripes with OmniFocus. It doesn’t want to respect hierarchy across all perspectives. If you nest tasks like this then you lose all sense of where it is in the project.

The only way I found to get around this was to add project specific information to the task itself. That way you could see: Open consolidated interview schedule for Person X, Do interview with Person X.

It does mean that you can’t just copy/paste templates, but you can make use of Curt Clifton’s popular Populate Template Placeholders script. You can create template tasks like Do interview with «Person» and run the script and it’ll prompt you to replace those with the person’s name.

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This is what I do in a similar situation. I use Shortcuts to create the task hierarchy and fill in the parent action names in the subtasks.

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If you use the Taskpaper import, you could use TextExpander fill in fields as an alternate to the other two options @ChrisUpchurch and @kennonb mentioned.

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Thanks to all of you for the suggestions and for validating that I’m not totally off my rocker! I might have to play around with placeholders or variables, I think shortcuts may be a good option here, and I’ll definitely take a look at Curt Clifton’s script suggested by @kennonb!

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This is my biggest issue by far with OmniFocus too.

I might be doing it wrong, but I would prefer some flexibility here. For some of my task hierarchies, I’ve started creating a Separate Task with a link to the actual Parent Task, then I only have Flags/Due Date whatever on the Separate Task. :man_facepalming:t2:

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I have that same issue, with that same series of tasks — schedule, conduct, and transcribe interviews — and the only solution I’ve found is to put the interview subject’s name in the task.

For subprojects, I’ve resigned myself to appending a colon and the subproject name after every task in the subproject so that the subproject is always easily identifiable in Context views. So, using your Participant 1 subproject as the example, “Transcribe Jones Interview: Participant 1” is how the transcribe task would look in my “system.”

I keep resolving to find a way to automate, or remove some of the steps from, that appending part, but it comes up just infrequently enough that I never get around to doing it.

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