Custom Perspectives for OmniFocus
Custom perspectives provide a quick and convenient way to tap into your OmniFocus database.
Below, you’ll find examples showing some of the many ways custom perspectives can be used to quickly and conveniently access the most relevant information from OmniFocus and help ensure that your database is up-to-date and relevant.
Custom perspectives require OmniFocus Pro. As noted in the descriptions, some reference specific tags and folders. You may need to make changes to adapt them to work with your OmniFocus setup.
Table of Contents
Action Perspectives
When it’s time to take action, it’s helpful to hone in on the most relevant actions as quickly and conveniently as possible. The following are some examples of how OmniFocus perspectives can help.
- Projects: What’s Next — The next available action for each of your active projects (defined outcomes).
- Today — Actions that are candidates for completion today. Some actions show up automatically, and others are handpicked from your available actions.
- Today: Important — Available actions that are particularly important, either because they’re flagged, overdue, or due soon.
- Today: BIG Rocks – Actions from your Today list that will take over 30 minutes to complete.
- Today: Small Rocks – Actions from your Today list that will take 5-30 minutes to complete.
- Today: Pebbles – Actions from your Today list that can be completed in five minutes or less.
Review Perspectives
It’s important to review OmniFocus regularly to ensure that it accurately reflects your life and work and to keep your commitment level in check. These perspectives give you a quick way of seeing what’s on your plate and what’s on your radar.
- Projects: Active — All projects (defined outcomes) you’re actively working towards. Single action lists, checklists, and template projects are automatically excluded from the list.
- Projects: Completed – All completed projects (defined outcomes) grouped according to when they were completed.
- Projects: Due — All incomplete projects (defined outcomes) with a due date.
- Projects: Inactive — All projects (defined outcomes) that are inactive, either because they’ve been deferred to a future date or put on hold. Single action lists, checklists and template projects are automatically excluded from the list.
- Waiting — Everything that you’re currently waiting for grouped by tag.
System Maintenance Perspectives
OmniFocus perspectives can be very helpful for maintaining a system that is complete and consistent. The following perspectives help ensure that OmniFocus will serve you well when it’s time to take action.
- Actions: No Duration — All remaining actions that don’t have an estimated duration.
- Actions: Stale – Available actions that haven’t been touched for a while.
- Actions: Untagged — All untagged actions, excluding unprocessed actions in the inbox.
- Overdue – All projects, action groups, and actions past their due date and time.
- Projects: Stalled – All active projects (defined outcomes) with no remaining actions.
- Projects: Unfiled — All projects (defined outcomes) that haven’t been filed into a folder.
All Perspectives
Actions: No Duration
It can be helpful to give each of your actions an Estimated Duration. This adds a bit of extra work upfront and allows you to quickly pull up a list of short or long actions, whatever’s most relevant to your current circumstances. Additionally, spending a few extra seconds to think about how long an action will take can help ensure that you don’t try to pack too much into the day.
This perspective shows all remaining actions without an estimated duration. Items in the inbox are excluded from this list as they’re considered unprocessed.
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Actions: Stale
This perspective identifies available actions you’ve added to OmniFocus that haven’t been touched in a while. Review this perspective periodically and make a point of doing actions that have been taking up space in your system for a while. Along the way, clarify the action to be taken. If an action is no longer worth your time and energy, drop it or delete it.
This perspective considers actions “stale” if they haven’t been modified in six months. Adjust the “modified date” rule if six months is too long or too short. If this perspective surfaces an available action that you don’t consider “stale,” modify it in some way (e.g. add a note) to reset the modification date and time.
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Actions: Untagged
Adding at least one tag to each action helps ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. For example, if you create an action of “Pick up supplies at Home Depot” and forget to give it a tag of “errand,” you may miss it when you’re out running errands and must make an extra trip.
This perspective lists all remaining actions that are currently untagged. Items in the inbox are excluded from this list as they’re considered unprocessed.
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Overdue
This perspective identifies all remaining projects, action groups, and actions with a due date and time in the past. Actions are grouped by when they became due, so it’s easy to distinguish tasks that recently became overdue from those whose due dates passed some time ago.
On a related note, we recommend only using the due field if there’s a consequence of not completing a task by a specific date and time. Assigning due dates/times arbitrarily makes distinguishing between aspirational and actual due dates difficult. Read the article Best Practice: Use Due Dates Sparingly to learn more.
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Projects: Active
It’s helpful to quickly pull up a list of all projects (defined outcomes) you’re working towards. If you’re considering taking on something new, refer to this list to ensure you won’t become overcommitted by adding another project.
This perspective includes projects with a defined outcome (i.e. sequential and parallel projects) and omits lists of one-off items (i.e. single action “projects”).
You may want to enhance this perspective to, for example, exclude folders that contain templates and checklists. New projects can be created using templates, but the template projects don’t represent defined outcomes. Checklists are called up when needed and don’t belong in this perspective.
Active projects appear in the sidebar; click on a project or folder to see their contents. Completed actions and action groups are filtered out.
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Projects: Completed
Looking back at all the projects you’ve brought to fruition can be very helpful. This review helps clarify where you’re spending your time and attention and can be useful when providing status updates to your employer. It also provides a great opportunity to celebrate your accomplishments.
This perspective excludes single action lists as these don’t represent defined outcomes. Repeated projects (e.g. morning reviews) can clutter up this perspective and are excluded. Consider disabling the “Is repeating” rule if your repeating projects represent significant outcomes and you want to see them in this perspective.
The sidebar shows completed projects. Projects are grouped in the outline based on when they were completed.
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You could further enhance this perspective by adding a date range rule. For example, you could opt only to show projects that have been completed in the past month.
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By default, OmniFocus places a line through completed or dropped items, also known as resolved items. This strike can make viewing perspectives like this one challenging. Fortunately, you can turn off this strike by going to Settings > Appearance and unchecking “Strike resolved items.”
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Projects: Due
When reviewing your system, it can be helpful to look at what projects have a due date associated with them and identify any that are past due.
This perspective shows all remaining projects that have a due date. Action groups and actions are excluded from this perspective.
Projects are grouped by due date and sorted by the project order. Seeing the same list of projects in the sidebar and outline is redundant, so this perspective’s sidebar is hidden by default.
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Projects: Inactive
You may have some projects in OmniFocus that are deferred to the future, either because you can’t take action on them yet or because you won’t have the capacity to take on this work until a future date. Some projects may be on hold indefinitely; perhaps something more important came along, and you had to pause these pursuits temporarily.
To help ensure that these inactive projects aren’t forgotten, this perspective shows all of the projects in your system that are either on hold or deferred to a future date. Repeating projects (e.g. weekly and daily reviews) are excluded from the list.
Projects are grouped by defer date and sorted by project order. Seeing the same list of projects in the sidebar and outline is redundant, so this perspective’s sidebar is hidden by default.
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Projects: Stalled
By definition, a stalled project is a sequential or parallel project that has no remaining actions. It’s considered “stalled” because these projects represent a defined outcome, and there aren’t any actions to move them toward completion. Single action lists represent related actions, typically in a specific area of life. They can be empty without being considered “stalled” as they don’t represent a defined outcome.
This perspective shows all of the stalled projects grouped by folder.
If the project is complete (i.e. the objective has been reached), mark it complete. You can also put this project on hold or drop it altogether if it’s no longer relevant or worth your time.
If the project is still relevant and you haven’t reached your objective, add at least one action to each stalled project to keep them moving forward. If you’re unsure what to do next, consider adding an action to get in touch with someone who’s done this sort of project before.
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Projects: Unfiled
Folders can be helpful for group projects and actions related to specific areas of life and work. For example, you might have a top-level folder called “Personal” that contains all the projects and actions related to personal areas of life and another called “Work” for work-related activities.
This perspective shows all of the unfiled projects and single action lists. In other words, it shows a list of all the projects and single action lists that haven’t been placed in a folder.
Please Note: For this to work as expected, the “Contained within project or folder” rule must include a complete list of your top-level folders.
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Projects: What’s Next
A project’s next action is the next action to be taken to move a project towards completion. This perspective shows the next actions for each of your active projects. In this context, a “project” represents an outcome, and the actions within the project contribute to this outcome. Single action lists contain one-off actions that don’t contribute to a specific outcome and aren’t included in this perspective.
The projects are grouped by folder so you can easily focus on one area of your life and work.
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Today
There are probably many things you could be doing at any given moment. Coming face to face with a list of your available OmniFocus actions will likely be a daunting experience. And you’ll probably spend too much time deciding what to work on next.
The Today perspective offers a subset of your available actions. Actions with defer dates that have arrived and actions that will soon be due will automatically show up in the Today perspective. You can manually add available actions to the Today perspective by flagging them or adding a “today” tag. You can use the sidebar to refine your list of choices further. For example, you could tap on the “Phone” tag to see a list of all the phone calls on your list for today.
Actions are grouped by due and sorted by due & flagged, so your most time-sensitive and important messages will automatically appear at the top of the list.
Please Note: For this to work as expected, the “Tagged with any of” rule must be updated to reflect your “today” tag.
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Also, check out the Today: Important perspective. It’s a natural complement to the Today perspective, only showing available actions that are flagged, due soon, or overdue. There are also Today perspectives based on duration (Today: BIG Rocks, Today: Small Rocks, and Today: Pebbles)
Today: Important
There are likely some especially important actions. Tasks that you’ve promised to complete in the near future and ones that you’d like to get done today, even though they could technically be completed tomorrow with no significant consequences.
The Today: Important perspective shows all available actions that are flagged, due soon, or overdue. This perspective shows a subset of the actions included in the Today perspective, specifically available actions that are due or flagged.
For this list to be useful, it needs to be kept short. Limiting this list to a maximum of 15 items is best as a rule of thumb. Once you’ve completed everything on Today: Important, you can add more actions by going to the Today perspective and flagging one or more actions. Or you could call it a day and reward your efforts with a 🛀 warm bath and a good night’s 😴 sleep.
Actions that appear on Today: Important are grouped according to the due date so that actions that are due soon or overdue can easily be identified.
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Today: BIG Rocks
Identifying things on your list for today that will take significant time to complete is helpful. You might want to block off time for these longer actions. The BIG Rocks perspective is the same as the Today perspective except that it only shows actions with an estimated duration of more than 30 minutes.
Please Note: For this to work as expected, the “Tagged with any of” rule must be updated to reflect your “today” tag.
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Today: Small Rocks
Identifying things on your list for today that will take some time to complete is helpful. You can complete these actions if you have a gap between meetings. They could also be good candidates for actions to take care of at the start of the day. The Small Rocks perspective is the same as the Today perspective except that it only shows actions with an estimated 5-30 minutes duration.
Please Note: For this to work as expected, the “Tagged with any of” rule must be updated to reflect your “today” tag.
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Today: Pebbles
Are you heading off to lunch in 10 minutes? Having a list of actions that don’t take very long and can be completed when you don’t have much time to work with is helpful. The Pebbles perspective is the same as the Today perspective except that it only shows actions with an estimated duration of five minutes or less.
Please Note: For this to work as expected, the “Tagged with any of” rule must be updated to reflect your “today” tag.
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Waiting
You can track what you’re waiting for by creating actions and tagging them with a waiting tag. Setting this tag’s status to “On Hold” will prevent waiting items from cluttering your lists of available actions. The downside is that it’s easy to forget to review what you’re waiting for.
This perspective makes monitoring your waiting list quick and convenient. It shows all remaining actions that contain a tag of “⏸️ Waiting” (the ⏸️ emoji was added for visual flair and is completely optional).
This perspective is grouped by project so you can easily identify things you’re waiting for in specific projects and single action lists.
Please Note: For this to work as expected, the “Tagged with any of” rule must be updated to reflect your “waiting” tag.
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