Kaitlin Salzke makes excellent OmniFocus plug-ins. I’ve written before about the “work on” plug-in, which solves the problem of having to identify the next step for projects where the next step is simply and always “keep working on it”. I’m using this especially for projects that are tracked in the issue tracker at work.
Anyways, another amazing plug-in is the “scheduling” plug-in, which adds an important date to the mix of dates I can set on a task: scheduled dates. A scheduled date is a date that basically says “I’m planning to work on this on this date”. Why is this powerful? Because until now I had to abuse either defer dates (which actually mean - or I take them to mean - “I can work on this starting from this date”) or due dates (this has to be done by this date or I’m in trouble).
Let’s say it’s Wednesday today (which it is at the point of writing) and I have a task that I think I’ll work on on Friday. With scheduled dates I don’t need to defer tasks until Friday or set a due date for Friday - both would not reflect reality. Instead I can now correctly express that I can work before Friday on this task, but I plan to do so on Friday.
The plug-in makes use of tags to implement the feature and it is to thoughtfully executed, that I highly recommend giving it a try.