Setting review intervals in OmniFocus
Published 2011-12-12 @ 15:35
Tagged thoughts
I’ve been refining my omnifocus strategy a lot of late. One thing I’ve done is set all of my review intervals to be a prime number of weeks and then evenly staggered them based on their priority. I’ve got 5 different priority levels on my projects and they’re currently spread out like so:
date\ tot 1w 2w 3w 5w 7w
2011-12-16 Fri: 23 7 6 3 6 1
2011-12-23 Fri: 17 0 6 3 7 1
2011-12-30 Fri: 11 0 0 3 7 1
2012-01-06 Fri: 8 0 0 0 7 1
2012-01-13 Fri: 8 0 0 0 7 1
2012-01-20 Fri: 1 0 0 0 0 1
2012-01-27 Fri: 1 0 0 0 0 1
total: 69 7 12 9 34 7
This way all of my priority 1 projects are looked at every week. Half of my priority 2 are seen every week. Etc. This normalizes the amount of projects I need to review on any given week. It has helped a lot because they used to clump up a fair amount. If you only have 10-20 projects, this probably isn’t as big of a deal to you, but when you get to 40+, it starts to matter.
One thing I had problems with was getting the values set easily. I finally figured out the applescript mumbo-jumbo. Setting the review interval was tough, as structs are treated differently in applescript for some reason. The trick is to set it to a local variable, modify it, and then set it back:
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tell application "OmniFocus" tell default document repeat with proj in flattened projects set ri to review interval of proj if (steps of ri) > 3 then set steps of ri to 7 set review interval of proj to ri end if end repeat end tell end tell |
This sets any project that has a review interval of 4+ weeks to be 7 weeks. Tweak the numbers however you see fit and run it once to normalize everything.