Use due dates to honour your commitments. Just make sure you’re only using due dates for things that are actually due.
If you’d like to get something done by Friday, it might be tempting to assign a due date of Friday, even though it isn’t technically due on Friday. The problem with assigning due dates arbitrarily is that it becomes difficult to distinguish between what’s actually due and what you’d like to have completed by a given date. The end result is typically a growing number of “overdue” tasks and projects, resulting in heightened stress levels.
Honouring Your Commitments
When used appropriately, due dates in OmniFocus are a great way to track your commitments. If you tell someone, you’ll call them by the end of the week, create an action such as “Call Harry about the upcoming trip to Zanzibar” and give it a due date of Friday. This is something you’ve given your word to, and not calling by Friday as promised could have consequences, large or small. As you become known as someone who honours commitments, you’ll likely find that all kinds of new opportunities open up.
Flagging Important Actions
If there’s no commitment to complete something by a specific date, leave the due date blank. If a particular task is important and you’d like to complete it today, flag it to make it stand out from your other available tasks. If it’s something that you’d like to get to on Friday, flag it and then defer it to Friday. Once Friday comes along, it will become available, and the flag will remind you that it’s especially important.
Making Use of OmniFocus Tags
Tags can also help define time frames and ensure that projects and actions aren’t forgotten.
You can designate a “today” tag in the Forecast perspective in OmniFocus. As the name implies, all available actions containing this tag will appear under “Today” in the Forecast perspective. This provides a convenient way to see tasks you’ve earmarked for today alongside deferred, due and flagged tasks.
Tags can also represent different times of day (e.g. morning, afternoon, and evening), days of the week, months, and years. Our OmniFocus Tags Directory includes a section showcasing examples of date and time tags.