Schedulling recurring tasks on Things 3 a long digression

[ldebritto]

I’m not Omnifocus-proficient but will try my best:

@thealbs

• The “When” is actually the Defer Date
• The Deadline is actually the Due Date

These seem to be fair “translations”.

@thealbs

The Upcoming list is actually a ‘Deferred Until’ list and I should not review this on a regular basis

I think they may be considered to be similar.

Although I would disagree on the review part: I like to review my Upcoming list on a weekly (so I can time-block my most important tasks) and daily, so I can reconsider if a given task still must be done that day or if it can be safely moved to the Anytime list.

@thealbs

Where I want a Due Date but don’t want to Defer the Task, I would set the Deadline to the Due date and the When to today?

As per this one, I would not set its When to Today unless I’m really positive I will work on it today.

If I’m not sure I’ll work on it today, I will leave the When field blank, so the task will land into my Anytime list.

I guess the goal is to keep the Today list with just the priorities for that day (that also seems to be the key idea behind Cultured Code’s description of their designed flow). Anything else that you can work on, but don’t need to work on that day, should be kept on Anytime.

There’s a trick to get more use of the Anytime and without clogging your Today list: you can filter it by tag, so you can create an Ominfocus-like “Perspectives”. Let me give you an example:

• If I add a task to Things like this “Call the Painter re. quotation” on my “Moving” Project and tag it with “Phone” tag

  • It doesn’t have a due date, so leave Deadline blank
  • I can do it now, so no need to Schedule it for a future date
  • I don’t need to do it right away, so I will not mark it for Today but just leave When empty

• The end result is that it will land into my Anytime list

• Every day I have a time block for comms, this time I would filter down my list (coincidentally, I just wrote about this here) to gather every Anytime task with the “Phone” tag, so I can decide on whether to make this call or not.

Should that call have a deadline, then I can trust the system as it will surface to my Today list if I happen not to complete it before.

@thealbs

I do wonder if the Things Developers also had the same intent, and you have found a way to make their product work better ! I also wonder if Things 4 (if we ever see it) might ‘fix’ the issue and inadvertently break your workflow… but only time will tell !

Finally, I actually don’t overthink this one. The main idea is to have a grasp on the flow. I guess that flow could be replicated in virtually any app that:

1. supports start and due dates (so you can ignore items that can’t be started at the moment, that’s where Reminders fails at this moment),
2. allow for filtering of flagged items (so one could replicate Today list) and
3. lets you filter lists by tags (so one could look for “Phone” tagged items across different areas and projects).

I just happen to really like the way Cultured code implemented it and many other niceties on their design philosophy.