For the longest time I’ve been (ab)using due dates in OmniFocus to mark things that either need to be done by a certain time or that I want them to be done then. While this works it involves a bit of a manual process to remember when that due date is or is not a hard deadline.
The Omnigroup on 2025-08-26 released OmniFocus 4.7 and it adds a new field to each task that should due away with this ambiguity: Planned date. They behave pretty much like the other date fields when it comes to inheriting their value from projects or parent tasks with some minor differences regarding the range you can set them in.
While planned dates are definitely my personal highlight, there are also other new features like being able to set tags within a tag group to be mutually exclusive. If you, for instance, use tags to determine priority on certain tasks, you could create a tag group called “Priority” and have tags like “Immediate”, “Important”, “Default”, “Backburner” … in there as mutually exclusive.
Repeated items can now also be configured to not end up in the “Past” pile in the forecast view if a newer iteration would already be available. Especially while being away for a few days this should help me not to get pilled on by “Water the plants” tasks 🤪
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