Examples are meetings, conference calls, flights - anything that requires a specific block of time. Three temporal bucketsД«efore looking at the Forecast perspective itself, here are the three categories: Calendar EventsДЄ calendar event is something with a definite start time and end time. IвЂ™ve been excited to move to OmniFocus 3 because the new features of the Forecast perspective provide a great way to work with all three categories in one view. I now conceptually divide events and actions into three categories, described below. It also made me think more about how I manage calendar events and actions. Just this one adjustment changed my use of OmniFocus considerably, making it work even better for me. I no longer use due dates for things I hope to get done on a certain day. I adopted this philosophy and now I assign a due date to an action only if it absolutely needs to happen by that date. The forum replies I received applied that same philosophy to due dates in OmniFocus - actions should have due dates only if the action must be completed by a certain deadline. I gained many insights reading that book, including the notion that the only things that belong on your calendar are things that absolutely must happen on a certain date or date and time. One reply also referred to the popular GTD methodology, which led me to read David AllenвЂ™s book Getting Things Done. I was asking questions related to due dates in the OmniFocus forum, and a number of replies made me rethink my approach. This added a lot of overhead, constantly adding and changing due dates for actions that I only hoped to get done on a particular day.

I either had to spend time bumping the due dates forward, or else look at a sea of red вЂoverdueвЂ™ items in OmniFocus. So this approach led to many items not getting done and showing up as overdue. IвЂ™d do this even if the task didnвЂ™t absolutely need to get done today - it was just a task I was hoping to get done.ДЄt the start of a day, itвЂ™s easy to be optimistic about what youвЂ™ll accomplish during the day. When I began using OmniFocus, I was following habits I had used in the past.ДЇor example, if there was an action I wanted to get done today, IвЂ™d set the due date for the end of the day. The help and insights IвЂ™ve received reading and asking questions in the forums have been very valuable, including helping me move from old habits to a new way of doing things. IвЂ™ve found the community to be very welcoming to newcomers and willing to answer questions both basic and advanced. I have not done this alone, but with help from the OmniFocus community.Д«eyond the OmniFocus app there is a helpful community of users - part of the online forums OmniGroup maintains for all of their apps at. During that time, IвЂ™ve also refined my thinking about task management. It has helped me stay organized and accomplish a good many things. Over the past year, IвЂ™ve enjoyed using OmniFocus a great deal. I had been using the вЂњkeep it all in your headвЂќ approach until about a year ago when I decided to give OmniFocus a try. There have also been times when IвЂ™ve given up on using any sort of formal system, trying to keep everything straight in my head and making occasional to-do lists in Notes. Over the years, IвЂ™ve used many task and time management systems, from paper-based system like Filofax, Day Runner, and Franklin Planners to digital systems like DayMaker, Now Up-to-Date and IN CONTROL. That change in thinking, combined with new functionality in OmniFocus 3 makes the Forecast perspective an ideal view of everything I need to get done across all my devices -В Mac, iPhone, and iPad. I started using OmniFocus about a year ago and since that time, with some help from the OmniFocus community, my thoughts about task management have changed.

In OmniFocus 3, the Forecast perspective gains a number of new features that has transformed it into my daily dashboard. OmniFocus gives you a great deal of flexibility to customize how you keep organized, including viewing your projects and actions in different ways called Perspectives.

Omnifocus forum