Omnifocus Series Part 3

(Psst…. Looking for the “missing tricks”?  Look below!)

Have you ever realized that you could set due dates without looking at your calendar?  Omnifocus has a nifty trick for due dates that will make your life easier.  In this follow up to Part 1 and Part 2, you will learn about this useful hack so setting due dates in task managers like Omnifocus or Things is a snap.

Go to the inspector for Omnifocus and enter the due date you want without typing the month, day or year.  Let’s say you have to meet someone named Karin “next Monday”.  All you have to do is enter next Monday and Omnifocus will figure out the exact month, day and year.

This works for:

• Tomorrow
• Yesterday
• 2 weeks
• 1 year

So on and so forth.

In fact, you can skip the typing in the full “Monday” and just use short forms like “Mon” or “mon”.  Avoid shortening for “weeks” (avoid wk or wks) and even “years” (avoid yr or yrs) — use the full form for these ones.

If you want you can even specify the time.  Here’s an example:  ”2 weeks 5 pm.” Omnifocus figures out the date and time yet again.  And this works well if you…

Have a Calendar!?

Specifically iCal that is.  You can actually go to Omnifocus’ Preference menu, select the iCal icon and menu and setup the Sync.

If you have specified an exact time then Omnifocus will put the action item in the right time slot.  If you want to setup alerts or reminders however you’ll have to do it right in iCal (Omni Group is probably working on that as we speak).  Omnifocus can also narrow down which kinds of actions you want to put into the calendars and which calendars you want to put them into.

Watch out though because if you have lots and lots of items with due dates your calendars could become hard to read.  Personally I tend to avoid using the sync because I have so many due dates that can come around (and the triple reminders that come with it).

If you want to set reminders, you can use the rule of 3 kind of like this.

• A reminder 1 hour before
• A reminder 3-5 hours before
• A reminder 10+ hours before

Change it as needed.  It’ll give you a leg up in getting to your appointments in time.

In Summary

Omnifocus can make setting due dates a lot easier.  In fact this is a little trick I completely missed until just recently.  I thought, “There must be an easier way!”  Any how let me and the other visitors know about programs you use that already have this little trick built in because Omnifocus is probably just one of the few.

PS.  Would love to put together a list of your most popular productivity programs!  (Its probably changed since I last looked)

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