Omnifocus 3 Editing Colors Plus Another Tag

This way, Ill be able to see all research-related tasks on a single screen and group them by due date; I have a feeling Ill be taking advantage of the DEVONthink URL scheme to link many of those tasks to specific files or groups in DEVONthink, where I plan to store all my research material this year.

The set is available at 17.99 with a launch promo; Club MacStories members can purchase it at an additional 15 off.

If youre not familiar with this functionality, I recommend checking out this excellent guide over at Learn OmniFocus; alternatively, you can read The Omni Groups official perspective documentation here.

You can also find other solid examples of OmniFocus users custom setups around the web such as these two, which helped me better understand the power and flexibility of perspectives in OmniFocus when I was new to the app.

In this story, Im going to focus on how Ive been using perspectives to put together a custom sidebar in OmniFocus that helps me navigate my busy life and make sense of it all.

While most task managers are limited to displaying projects, tags, or upcoming tasks, OmniFocus offers all of those options but also enables me to create my own personalized views that fit the way I want to manage my tasks.

Instead of being limited to either seeing whats due todaysoon or viewing my tasks by list (which is how most task managers operate), perspectives in OmniFocus empower me to create custom views that filter tasks matching specific criteria.

This perspective presents me with a list of all upcoming tasks across all projects, including those that have a defer date, which I usually dont see in other perspectives.

Its very easy to put together in the perspective editor (all tasks are simply grouped by due date), and it provides me with a unified dashboard to view all my upcoming tasks at once.

I like how emoji add a touch of color to the app, and they also help the tag bubbles visually stand out more especially in dark mode.

This perspective lets me see all writing-related tasks belonging to either MacStories or Club MacStories.

Omnifocus 3 Editing Colors Plus Another Tag

Whenever I create a new task in OmniFocus for something I have to write about, I tag it as Writing, plus another tag that is either Club or Website.

With this system, I was able to put together a perspective that filters all remaining tasks that have been tagged with Writing but then splits them into two separate groups thanks to the Group actions by: Tags (Combined) perspective filter, as pictured below.

As you can see above, the visual separation between Club and website-related writing tasks also looks quite nice thanks to emoji.

All the tasks I enter in OmniFocus have either a due date or a defer date, and sometimes both.

Ive never liked the idea of adding items to a task manager without dates, but I also dislike how other tasks managers, due to their lack of defer dates, default to showing all upcoming tasks, even if I cant do anything about some of them yet.

With my custom Available perspective, I can see all tasks that are available to me right now, and theyre grouped by tags so I can easily scan the list by areas of responsibility.

This is a custom view that lets me see everything coming up in the next 24 hours (including deferred tasks), and nothing beyond that, which helps me get a sense of what Im supposed to be taking care of within the next day.

The key filter behind this perspective is the Status: Due Soon flag; you can configure what Due Soon means in OmniFocus settings, choosing from a range of options such as today and 24 hours up to 1 week.

Im sure I will be tweaking this setup over the next few months as I get a better grasp of the projects scope and deadline, but in the meantime I wanted to share the three custom perspectives Ive created to help me manage the first stage of review-related work.

This is similar to the All Writing perspective, except it filters tasks by project rather than tag.

Next, in thinking about what Ill be doing for the first couple weeks after WWDC, I created a Research perspective that aggregates tasks from the iOS 14 Review project which have also been tagged with Research.

Omnifocus 3 For Mac Editing Colors