![]() ![]() Both groups of tasks belong to the same project, but they’re fundamentally different in terms of urgency. For instance, I may have a group of tasks due within a week concerning things I’m supposed to complete for the chapter I’m currently working on and – in the same project – tasks that are due in September, which detail the final steps for assembling the finalized review. Historically, when working on my iOS review in the middle of the summer, I’ve always struggled with being unable to split review-related tasks between short-term and long-term ones. Lastly, I want to highlight a custom perspective I’m really happy with. With my custom ‘Available’ perspective, I can see all tasks that are available to me right now, and they’re grouped by tags so I can easily scan the list by areas of responsibility. I’ve 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 can’t do anything about some of them yet. ![]() All the tasks I enter in OmniFocus have either a due date or a defer date, and sometimes both. I use the same approach of visually separating tasks in different areas with my ‘Available’ perspective. As you can see above, the visual separation between Club and website-related writing tasks also looks quite nice thanks to emoji. The ‘Tags (Combined)’ filter is one of the most powerful aspects of OmniFocus’ perspective engine as it can create dynamic sub-groups based on tags. The ‘Podcasts’ perspectives is similar to the ‘All Writing’ one – it’s a quick filter to see all my remaining podcast-related tasks. It’s 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. This perspective presents me with a list of all upcoming tasks across all projects, including those that have a defer date, which I usually don’t see in other perspectives. My most used perspective, by far, is a simple one I call ‘Radar’. Instead of being limited to either seeing what’s due today/soon 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. 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. ![]() I went back to OmniFocus several months ago, and as I explained on AppStories previously, the ability to create custom views that filter specific tags or projects with particular sorting criteria is my absolute favorite feature of the app. ![]() In this story, I’m going to focus on how I’ve been using perspectives to put together a custom sidebar in OmniFocus that helps me navigate my busy life and make sense of it all. 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. If you’re not familiar with this functionality, I recommend checking out this excellent guide over at Learn OmniFocus alternatively, you can read The Omni Group’s official perspective documentation here. Let me clarify upfront, however, that this article isn’t meant to be a primer on custom perspectives in OmniFocus. The set is available at $17.99 with a launch promo Club MacStories members can purchase it at an additional 15% off.Īs part of the release of MacStories Perspective Icons (which, by the way, takes advantage of a new feature in OmniFocus 3.8 to install custom icons with a Files picker), I wanted to write about my perspective setup in OmniFocus and explain why custom perspectives have become an integral component of my task management workflow. You can find more details on the product page, read the FAQ, and check out my announcement blog post here. A few weeks ago, we released the latest product under the MacStories Pixel brand: MacStories Perspective Icons, a set of 20,000 custom perspective icons for OmniFocus Pro. ![]()
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