I think those of us who use OF have all jumped out to say “OF cAn Do tHiS tHoUgH,” which is really missing the point of your original post. There are plenty of apps that don’t support this sort of workflow. I’ve always wondered why Todoist doesn’t have some sort of start/defer date, for example — it does seem obvious.
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Oh no, not my intention at all.
As I said, it’s interesting seeing people say, “you don’t need x, you can just do these n easy steps every day.” Where x is many things on the forum, not just start dates.
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The flip side are all the posts from folks complaining about stuff happening to them. "Why is it doing “n” when I did “x?” I often prefer the transparency of manual steps.
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This. As soon as applications start trying to cover the bases of everyone - especially Mac Power Users - they start to lose the transparency and simplicity for most of their users.
Adding start date in itself would be trivial.
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Indeed! …
Creative work often does not fit detailed GTD-style project/task breakdowns.
This observation is not original to me.
When I’m writing an article, it’s all just one big task that spreads itself out over days or weeks. It’s like digging a big deep hole in the ground – the job is just dig the hole.
My task list will just say, “work on article X.” And sometimes it doesn’t even say that. Working on that article is usually the most important thing I have to do that week, so there’s no reason for me to remind myself of it.
Task managers are for other things I have to do that are not writing.
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I think it can get messy pretty quick. What happens with recurring tasks and deferred dates? What happens with subtasks? What with recurrent subtasks? What if I complete before hand a recurring tasks o subtask? If you start covering each corner case, you end up with a complex product like OmniFocus, and there’s no pun intended here.
IMHO the Apple Reminders team chose to keep it simple to cover must basic needs.
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Yes, but there is a difference when writing multiple articles and giving lots of presentations is an important part of one’s job but are surrounded by hundreds of other tasks not related to them. In my case, my days are filled with meetings, reports, phone calls, events, emails, and more, AND the need to prepare several articles, reports, and presentations spread out over several organizations and timeframes. Consequently, I need my task manager to tell me which of several articles, reports, and presentations I need to work on now, wich ones I need to start sometime in the future, and when all of them are due.
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Here are two good explanations of what I’m trying to explain. 
The second one on OF 4 is very current and may be of interest independent of this particular thread.
For this first video, don’t let the initial questions sidetrack you. His explanation for why the Next tag is needed addresses the question I raised in this thread.
This is an interesting perspective on OF 4
Sorry, I am not going to lock 30 Min of YT, just to find something that could be, or could be not, hidden in there.
But, as you mentioned the “Next” tag, and the first Video seems to have that as a title, OF has this “Next” Tag for a long time, as we already mentioned several times throughout this thread.
So, if you want to show something that last several days in the “Today”-View, just put that “Next” Tag on it, and it will show up.
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Apologies if this has been mentioned as I just skimmed the thread but what works for me in both OF when I used it and Things is to have a repeating task “work on xyz project” with a link to it in the notes and just set it to repeat daily or weekdays with a defer date some time before it’s actually due.
That way work on project, tick of task because you have actually done it, and it reappears the next day for you to do it again. That way your today view does not get cluttered with the minutiae of the projects many tasks so the perception of overwhelm is avoided.
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I think the previous 68 messages give you sufficient background if you don’t want to watch. I didn’t see you mentioned in the message so not sure why you feel the need to respond to say you don’t want to watch it.
Thanks for sharing the links @Bmosbacker
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Yes, a forecast tag or a flag works well if you want a priority list of ongoing tasks in the Today view.
I think it can be even simpler, though. If you are good about defer dates, this is a powerful perspective. I wish it was on the sidebar out of the box. The progressive disclosure in OF4 invites novices to start by working out of the inbox this way.
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That’s helpful. I realise I did something similar with the Reminders task flag. I flagged tasks I planned to do that day (and unflagged any I knew I wouldn’t get round to, regardless of date). I also had an overnight Shortcut automation that would automatically flag anything due that day (or overdue) meaning they always (re)appeared on the list of potentials.
This still includes a manual daily review of upcoming tasks if you’re using the date field as a deadline/due rather than start date, though.
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I really only need these functions:
- Start date
- Due date
- Repeats every X days/weeks/months
- Tags
- Lists
- Views that allow me to select which lists I want to show, filtered by which tags
Every single todo app SUPPOSEDLY has this, yet they all work completely differently and requires me to basically retrain my brain to work with the authors magical thinking…
Oh, and they keep changing the terms! It’s not a list, it’s a project. No, it’s an area! No wait - it’s a supertask!
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This reminds me of the glory days of 2Do. That app had it all, but unfortunately was also abandoned and looked increasingly out of date.
I tried sticking with it for a while but it hadn’t seen any (apparently forthcoming) updates for 2+ years so I took my tasks/project management over to Things3 and Reminders.
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Isn’t this a good thing!?
There is not one Approach, when it came towards “Task-Management”.
Everybody has different needs, different views and different approaches to handle his/her tasks.
So, with different Approaches of those Apps, there is one for almost everybody!
It would be terrible, if all Apps would work exact the same way…
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It would definitely cut down on the number of developers. The first one to come up with a task manager wins. 
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2Do was awesome. I also keep looking to see if it gets an update. Sounds like that developer has been having a hard time keeping up and is very undecided about how to proceed in general. I feel bad for him.
Damnit, you optimists always ruin everything ;p
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