Simple. I would set a reminder for the future date, and when it rolled around, I would either push it into the future a day at a time or assign a new date.
In OF it would be the same - you’d just set it as a “due” date, and it would be “overdue” until you did something about it.
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Right, I use Things for this reason! I also find that I sometimes abuse the start date, since I know it will show up in the Today view which I look at every morning when I wake up. Sometimes I wake up and there are 25 tasks piled up in Today. No way I can finish all those 25 tasks today. Then I know I have to review my tasks and kill off the things I know I’m never going to do. It’s a form of procrastination. I don’t want to work on this task, so I throw in a start date a week from today. Off my mind, but I will eventually be reminded. This is the reason I can think of that task managers don’t offer the feature. It keeps you honest to only have tasks you are committed to working on. But is anyone really that disciplined? Doesn’t everyone have some aspirational tasks they throw into their task list?
This is why I love Notion, and August Bradley’s approach (I use Tiago Forte’s second brain more than August’s PPV as a system but absolutely take a lot of inspiration from August).
He talks about DO dates and DUE dates (I’m English so these words are pronounced differently but I enjoy the wordplay all the same). Here’s a pretty good video with him talking about it: Notion Task Lists & "Do Dates" (Viewer Q&A) - YouTube
DO dates are when you intend to do the task, which of course is before the DUE date, and gives you flexibility without missing the ultimate deadline.
I would argue that most tasks generally should take a day or two (always nuanced of course) if it takes longer the advice is usually to break the task into sub tasks.
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I use defer/start dates regularly. I love the way Things and OF implement them. And I’m baffled that this seems to be a minority view among people who use task managers.
Examples:
- Last Tuesday I filed a bug report on software. Friday, I still hadn’t heard back, and made a note to myself to check again in a couple of days if I still hadn’t heard anything. I set a start date to Tuesday. I don’t need to do it Tuesday—it’s a low priority bug—but I don’t want to do it today, tomorrow or Monday either.
- Until 2019, I was a frequent business traveler. I got in the habit of planning trips about six weeks in advance. I often knew about the the trips long before then, so I’d set a start date on my calendar of six weeks in advance of the trip. I didn’t have to start planning on that precise day, but I didn’t want to plan before then.
This way of working is so natural to me that I wonder how other people do these things?
Fortunately, I almost never use due dates. If the due date is important, I will write it as a note to myself in the text of the reminder. If I have a project that requires, say, 10 days to do, what good does it do me to have a special note show up on the last day that it’s due? That’s far too late for me to start work! So if I’m trying a to do app that doesn’t support the start dates, I just use the due date as a start date.
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It goes in the appropriate project list or it goes into the generic single task list.
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Exactly! And constantly selecting another defer date is a lot of extra clicking that should not be necessary. There ought to be a way to set a start as well as a due date so that the project is always in your today view as you are working on it during that time frame.
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But that does not work if you are working on, say, a presentation or a long-form article that requires multiple days, but needs to be worked on daily until it is finished or due.
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I believe I can say with integrity that, yes, I am. I am consistent with my weekly reviews and I don’t throw task in an arbitrary date as a means of ignoring it or procrastinating. I may not always know the exact date and so it may be changed from time to time during my weekly reviews but for the life of me, I don’t see how a start date is a hindrance to efficiency and productivity, or as a catalyst for procrastination. Perhaps I’m just missing something here.
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You never have a task that you think you “should” do (or maybe your wife thinks you should do it)? For example, clean the garage, but you really don’t want to do it?
In Reminders I use the date to specify when I’ll start working on something. If it has an absolute deadline when it’s due I’ll put that in the title of the task as a reminder. Works fine for me: I don’t have many tasks in progress on a day. Each morning I defer the start date if I’m not doing the task today which can be done (I’ve discovered!) with a keyboard shortcut.
In the case of Reminders, because it’s a generic, relatively simple task manager. Apple have assumed that most of their users are task managing, not project managing. They don’t need to track progress/delays and more sophisticated tools exist. Having start and end dates would complicate the querying and display options (tasks starting today, or in progress today, or due today, or overdue today? I used all these when I was project managing.)
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If you follow the GTD philosophy, there shouldn’t be any “projects” on your Tasklist. They belong within this approach onto your project list, and only the single Tasks you need to do to finish your project appear on the Tasklist.
Of course it is up to everybody personally, how he want to handle that, but this is the Approach of GTD, and as a lot of Taskmanager are following that today, it is the way they work.
In OF you can set a defer date (that works like a start date in that case), and also a Tag like “Next”, to keep an item constantly on your Todaylist, until you finish that item.
As there is no big difference in selecting a second date, or a Tag, it should be a valid approach for someone who handles it like you, with project instead of Tasks on the Todaylist, and using OF.
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It is and I would not want it to go away. What I want it to do is remain persistently visible in the today view until such time as I change it or the task has been completed. The way it works in OmniFocus now is it disappears unless each and every day I take the time to defer it.
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Sure it does.
Presentation might break into: outline, bullet point each slide, design slides 1-4, 5-8, etc., conclusion slide, practice.
Article might break into: outline, draft 1, draft 2, or part 1, part 2, etc.
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I miss spoke or more accurately miss typed. 
I meant task.
I think this doesn’t really matter, if you want to call it a Task, or a Project, in the way you use it.
I think the main difference is rather, that the GTD approach (as I understand it) does not “want” to have something that took several days like “Write this article/book/essay/whatever” on its Todaylist.
It rather should be “research item x for Project A”, and “read item z for Project A” and, “write 5 pages with the notes from items x and items z for Project A” and on an other day maybe “interview with C for Project A” “Write 3 pages with the notes of Interview C for Project A”, and so on.
With that approach, you will not have the need to keep a larger project/task that took several days, and consists of several steps, on your Todaylist.
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Understood but what if you need five days to write the article? There are not other tasks related to it, it is only writing and it will take me five days to do it. But I get busy, so I want to make sure that I don’t forget to do some of the writing each day. Obviously there are ways to handle this but it seems to me to make sense to have a start date and due date or completion date for any project as needed. A deferred date plus next tag in OmniFocus works fine. There is nothing however comparable in Apple reminders. As a result I use a flag and a smart list.
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First of all, I would think that your articles have some background, don’t they?
So you do some research for them, and prepare some notes and so on.
This could be all single tasks.
Also, if you write an article, you often have a kind of an order, to write a certain amount of pages, letters or so on, right?
You can broke that all up, into single tasks.
If you know in advance, that you will need 5 days for an article, you also know pretty much, how large this article would be. Lets say, you expect, or have to, write 20pages within those 5 Days, you could split 4 daily tasks of writing 5 pages a day. This also has the advantage, that you could get to a daily end. Instead of the daily feeling, with the 5 Day Article sitting there for the 5 days, that you are not finished yet with what you have to do, you could have the daily satisfication, to complete your daily tasks, and that you get something done on that day.
I’m an OF user who tends to work out of the “Available” perspective (rather than the “Today” perspective) which achieves what you want here (a task is persistently available across days unless its defer date is set ahead) I tend to use defer dates liberally at the project level and at “parent” levels in projects with a complex outline to control the sense of overwhelm!
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I have a perspective in OF that recreates the Things Today view for me, if I need it. So it’s possible to have that in OF too, although that particular perspective tool may be a new capability in OF4. Been on the beta so long I can’t remember.