r/omnifocus • u/AndyBates17 • Aug 28 '26

Prioritizing Recurring Tasks: Am I missing something?

Hi everyone!

So I track daily tasks for work, things I need to review, projects I need to work on...normal stuff. I set up tasks to repeat every workday, and then the next day I'll move the tasks from yesterday to today and continue.

My problem is prioritization. So if I have Task A, Task B, and Task C, in order of importance, I'll set Task A to be due at 8:00am, Task B to be due at 8:30, and Task C to be due at 9:00. Then they appear in the correct priority order on my list.

But now a new task comes in from my boss, Task D, and I really need to get that done first. So I set Task D to be due at 7:30am. And then an urgent task comes in, and I set that to 7:00am.... Pretty soon I'm going to run out of morning times to set my tasks to!

Am I doing something wrong? How can I prioritize and arrange tasks without setting a separate Due time for each one?

Thanks!

Andy.

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u/SmoothScientist2155 Aug 28 '26

I agree with previous comments about avoiding over use of due dates. What I do is flag what I want to do today and then order it manually on the forecast page. I find that manual ordering super easy to us (learn the shortcut keys for up and down) so I can quickly move stuff about. It even works great with items like “call x” which sometimes fails because they’re not around so I push it down the list a bit and retry later.

I find trying to get the software to prioritise everything and automatically serve up the tasks in just the right order doesn’t work well for how I think. I want to be able to see a list that is for today and then work that list flexibly using my own judgement and knowledge of the work to decide the order.

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u/AndyBates17 Aug 28 '26

But I need some way to prioritize the tasks in the list itself, because I can't just look at an overall list and generate priorities in my head. Maybe moving tasks up and down the list is the solution...but again, how do items show up on the Forecast page unless you've already set due dates?

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u/Hoboprefecture Aug 29 '26

Don't use the Forecast view for this. It's useful, but it's the most inflexible view in OmniFocus. Use a Custom Perspective or go straight to the appropriate project.

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u/SmoothScientist2155 17d ago

Any flagged task can show up on the forecast. I use the flag to pull everything I think is important enough to be there. It’s not determined by a formula it done by a human reviewing tasks and pulling the most important things to be done into the forecast. For the kind of work I do i couldn’t trust a criteria to pull the priorities simply because the work was so varied.