In a prior post I shared why I’ve moved back to OF. I had used it extensively several years ago so it has not taken me long to get back up to speed. But I have a question for current OF users. Do you or do you not have OF show your calendar within the app.? I have toggled the calendar view on and off and can’t quite decide if I like the calendar view in OF or prefer to only view events in the calendar app.
What is your preference and why?
I am not using the Forecast view at all which I find clumsy to use, so the calendar view is of no use to me. Instead I use a custom perspective called “Radar” sorting tasks by due date, and I use my calendar and watch to keep track of time-based events.
I’m a freelancer working most of the time from home and able to time-block my time extensively, though, so this calendar feature might be much more useful to somebody with a lot of time-based commitments during the day.
I use the calendar on – selecting for my work calendar and my personal calendar. I live in Forecast perspective. The calendar view for the selected date in Forecast integrated scheduled tasks and scheduled events (or all day events) in one integrated display, which I find very useful. It’s one of the main reasons I don’t switch to other task managers (like ToDoist) that put tasks on a calendar.
I use other perspectives to manage priorities, scan backlog, remove or change tasks as needed. But once scheduled, it’s Forecast perspective and the calendar that are the hub for me.
(FWIW, I also use the “Today” tag to bring to the forefront in the Forecast perspective past due things that have been hanging around as important to do, but haven’t been.)
I find it helpful. Coming from a GTD perspective I like that one page to see my day specific data - appointments, actions or information. It reminds me of my old Time/Design paper system which gave me the same view.
I have my calendar on but I don’t live in OmniFocus throughout the day. I’ve been using a Full Focus Planner to handle day to day stuff and OmniFocus is my task database.
The forecast perspective is a helpful guidepost so I don’t have to open a calendar app as well as OF to see what’s going on during my day.
Calendar on. Forecast view was the reason I took the plunge on OF when v2.0 came out.
Anything which puts my calendar in front of me helps. It’s still incredible how many things I miss which were on my calendar all along. One place I am always going to frequent is my Omnifocus forecast view.
OT. Just curious. If you use an Full Focus Planner, why bother with Omnifocus? Wouldn’t a plain text list, suffice as a database?
I prefer my calendars and tasks separate, so I can process them apart. This is mainly because I found that the view became too cluttered and it was hard to review compared to having just the tasks.
I do not create my calendar, my department secretary does and it can have a lot of events on there on some days, some important others not. I prefer to see that on my calendar as it breaks my focus on getting on with my tasks.
Good question — Primarily OmniFocus allows me to see only what’s available to me now. While my database isn’t as in depth as it used to be, there are still tasks and projects that are not relevant to me at certain times. And OmniFocus handles recurring tasks and projects extremely well.
I’ve also found that I hate planning in OmniFocus. But I hate structured projects on paper. So the mix of the two is a nice one!
But now that you say it, I could consider a plaintext list 
Thanks – good insight. I don’t like OF for planning either, and on the other hand I’ve migrated away from it so many times that for now it’s too much of a drag on my time to consider using text files myself. It’s ubiquity and consistency on every platform is still useful.
I have all of my calendars on, but I’ve never found forecast to be useful so I don’t open it, and probably don’t need my calendars there.
I don’t use due dates very often, though. If you use a lot of due dates it might be helpful.
The Things calendar integration has saved my bacon many times while I was using it. They’ve nailed their today view. Nailed it.
I filter down to a couple of calendars that actually affect what I might do today, but like many, I’m a mild user of Forecast and I only have it as a pinned perspective on a couple devices.
I also use the FF planner with OF! My system is a bit personalized (code for “useless to others”) but they complement each other nicely as a sort of sandwich with high level strategies and daily/weekly plans in the planner, and inboxes. detailed requirements and context-based lists in OF.
Off, I like separation between calendar must do on this day items and tasks which are often start on dates with a few due by dates.
I prefer to not have my calendar shown on Forecast view because I only use it when planning my next day/week— and in both cases looking at the calendar itself makes more sense to me because of the more visual clues as what my schedule really looks like.
I’ve come to the same conclusion. Thanks.