Another Round of "Next Action" Hide-and-Seek With OmniFocus

Two weeks ago, I complained about something not being quite right with the way OmniFocus -- a task management application based on GTD -- handles repeating actions, which may cause most of a project's actions to be hidden from you. In the comments to that blog post, a reader suggested three possible workarounds. Here's how useful those workarounds turned out to be, plus an official view on the topic by the OmniFocus developers.

As a quick refresher, here's the problem again: you've created a project in OmniFocus and set the actions in that project to repeat. When you check off the project's top-most (repeated) action, OmniFocus creates a new iteration of that action with updated due dates, but the new iteration is created in place of the old one, so it remains top-most in the project and, thus, the "Next Action." Consequently, when working in OmniFocus's Context View set to show only Next Actions, you will never get to see any of the other actions in the project while chugging away at your daily dose of tasks.

Let's see whether the suggestions provided by reader lucas help work around this issue.

Workaround #1: Repeating projects instead of repeating actions

By repeating a whole project instead of its individual actions, checked-off actions are properly moved out of your view, as the Next Action status is advanced to the top-most non-checked-off action in the project.

However, to make OmniFocus create the next iteration of the project once an iteration is completed, you need to go into Planning View and check off the whole project. Generally, this makes sense, as you would check off completed (non-repeating) projects during the weekly reviews. Still, for repeating actions, I'd prefer not having to go through any additional user intervention beyond just checking off the actions themselves.

What's more, when you do check off the project, OmniFocus creates a completely new project just like it instead of re-using the old one. This, also, is just as it should be, but, as a result, the project will vanish from your view if you are using the "Focus on Selected Projects" feature.

Finally, and very obviously, this only works when all actions in the project share the same repetition and due date settings. So, for projects with actions that should repeat with different time intervals, this solution can't be applied.

Workaround #2: Grouping repeating actions

Grouping repeating actions and setting the repetition for the group instead of the actions it contains does work -- but only for the actions inside the group. If you have several groups in a project, it fails just as if you had used individual, non-grouped actions.

And there is another, more general, problem with how OmniFocus handles groups that falls into the "This Needs Fixing" category: in OmniFocus, groups behave a bit like actions, but, then again, they don't. Let me explain.

Like actions, groups have a check box. Unlike actions, they do not appear in Context View; only the actions contained in the group do. So, to make OmniFocus create a new iteration of a repeating group, you have to go to Planning View and check off the group, then go back to Context View and continue with your work. Which totally breaks OmniFocus's -- otherwise totally ingenious -- concept of having separate views for planning and executing your projects.

Workaround #3: Using Start Dates

Unlike the previous two approaches, resorting to using start dates instead of due dates will actually cause OmniFocus to reliably assign the Next Action status not only to the top-most action, but to the top-most action whose start date lies in the past.

When an action is checked off, its start date is advanced according to its repeat settings. As soon as the updated start date lies in the future, the action is hidden, and the next action in line that is not yet hidden (because its start date lies in the past) is made Next Action.

The only condition for this to work is that the project type is "parallel." (For "sequential" projects, the top-most action remains Next Action regardless of due date, and all that happens in this case is that this action, and with it the complete project, is hidden from Context View.) If you can live with that minor limitation, using start dates does, indeed, provide a way to make repeating actions work.

And, yet, I yearn for more

Using start dates comes very close to how I think OmniFocus should handle repeating actions. And yet, I find using start dates rather unintuitive. Most task management systems I have seen so far use due dates in one way or another; but start dates? Also, I don't like the fact that this causes actions to be hidden until that start date.

Although this is just what the start date feature is supposed to do, it makes for an annoying side-effect if all you really want to do is "just" re-order repeating actions by due date and seeing the next action in line as soon as you check off its predecessor.

By the way I'm not the only one who struggles with this.

The "workaround" that does work

Thankfully, the good folks at the OmniGroup have an open ear for their customers' wishes, and they were kind enough to provide The Official Developer's View on this issue:

This is the intended behavior. Action order is of the utmost importance in project planning, particularly in the methodology on which this application is based. If it was the entire project that was meant to be repeated, then the repetition should be set to the project - not the action. If it were not the project, then various groupings might be in order. (Really, it varies from project to project and person to person.)

As you could see, repeating the project or using action groups will not work in all cases.

However, you're the only one who didn't expect this behavior which means, while we do feel that there might be solutions more inline with the methodology, we probably could have done a better job clarifying how to accomplish this. It is for this reason that we'd like to add an option that allows repeating actions to be inserted relative to its peers instead of its original, intended place in the project. We will be making this option available as soon as possible.

I have a feeling that there's a "not" missing in the first sentence of this paragraph. If not, I would wonder whether I should be seriously embarassed or feel flattered in an out-of-the-box-thinking kind of way...

Anyway, by adding this option -- I expect a new checkbox in the Project inspector pane, saying "Sort repeated actions by due date", or somesuch --, OmniFocus's behavior will not change at all for users who think the current method by which OmniFocus picks out the next Next Action is just fine. And for those of us who think that said method needs fixin', the real "workaround" will be just one mouse-click away.