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Creating Review Templates in OmniFocus

by Michaela on March 17, 2009

Hello, friends of OmniFocus! Let's sit down and have a little talk about review templates. Review templates are a means to stay on top of habitual work. The daily review is a list of actions that you'd normally complete every day. For example, reading and responding to mail messages, processing your Inbox (both physical and in OmniFocus), taking care of your plants, and so on.

Be careful though — this is not a list to remind you of the things you already remember to do like brushing your teeth (hopefully).

To set up a review template, create a new single-action list. This can be done by clicking the action menu in the sidebar and choosing New Single-Action List. Then, add all the things you'd like to stay on top of.

Choose each action and use the Inspector to give them a due date and a repeat interval (probably one day from completion date). Now, just keep an eye on your due perspective and you're set!

 

Comments

I've been using this for a while. Would be great if OmniFocus would have an option to auto delete items instead of marking completed for things like this.

Dave

03.17.09 12:11 PM

Thanks for giving out simple ideas like this. It is appreciated. Keep them coming.

Josh

03.17.09 6:03 PM

Is there a way of marking events to just repeat on weekdays. I don't need to do my daily review at the weekend…

James

03.18.09 10:36 AM

This is a great idea and something that will help me overcome my fear of “singletons”.


That being said, after I set up a list and performed a few other activities, I clicked on the cleanup button and my single-action list disappeared!


I've cleared all filtering and sorting- even showed months worth of previously completed activities- and I could not find my single-action list anywhere.


Curiously, one of the items that was due this morning Growled at me, but I still could not find it.


Am I missing something? Build 1.6 (v77.16.3.0.110061)

Henry

03.19.09 1:47 AM

Wow, two great suggestions: auto delete instead of marking complete (especially useful if you use a completed perspective like I do to keep track of what I've done throughout a given week), and weekend controls for daily repeating tasks. I second both of these motions.

Jason Clarke

03.19.09 3:48 AM

Well… Suppose you're an avid user of the system, and there's 5 items you want to do daily, then you generated roughly 1500 actions after a year.


I have 2600 actions in my database and I'm wondering if there's a usability-impacting limit somewhere?


I'd really like a checklist project type instead, where you can reset all actions to not done in that project and where marking an action done doesn't clean it up…

Wout Mertens

03.21.09 6:01 AM

Like DAVE said: “... have an option to auto delete items instead of marking completed for things like this.” I do NOT want to keep track of many things, but otherwise love the function to mark complete and have a clone created with a future due date. Currently I have to either manually set a new due date (yuck), or mark as complete, then delete the carcass.

omnibob

03.24.09 2:18 PM

YES! I know this isn't a poll, but I'm compelled to agree with previous comments about the problem “accumulation of completed daily/weekly tasks”.  I'm sure the “weekday repeating” function will come in time, but having to manually purge hundreds of dupe completed tasks from the OmniFocus archive doesn't feel very Omni.  (OmniFocus is still the greatest, though!)

steven

03.25.09 4:54 AM

This is helpful but I wonder if the great designers at OmniFocus could think about developing this a bit more. Tracking this kind of daily task is less about remembering what has been done but about disciplining oneself to keep up with certain things. I currently have been trying various iPhone “goal” tracking tools to do this but wish I could keep everything in my beloved OmniFocus. Thus, it would be very useful to have a special category of these kinds of daily tasks for which you can see stats on past performance, how long you have kept up (“chains”), and even record how much of something was done (I know this begins to look more like a log than a task manager but I think the overlap in the actual workflow of the user makes it worth incorporating this).

K. M. Lawson

04.02.09 2:09 PM
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