Things' Defer Date

After compiling my list of missing things in Things I decided to implement the Defer Date first since it’s something I used often with OmniFocus and way easier to do than implementing a Review perspective …

How it’s implemented

I got a bit of inspiration from Federico Viticcis Evening Mover (paywalled). This shortcut uses a Personal Automation to roll-over todays Evening tasks to tomorrows Evening tasks.

So I created a simple shortcut which runs daily at 00:01 and does the following:

• Find all of todays tasks with the tag Deferred
• Sets the tasks to Anytime
• Removes the tag Deferred

So I can assign the task to a date and set the task Deferred and it’ll be deferred until this date.

In the meantime I also added a step to remove all orphaned Deferred tags without a date. (as a clean-up step)

Improved Ergonomics

After setting up the automation I created another shortcut which lets me easily schedule and tag one or more tasks (or projects):

• Check if the tag is scheduled. If not select a date
• Add the Deferred tag

I also added a check whether the task is currently deferred and then remove the Deferred tag and set to Anytime.

Update: For projects I added a quick way to defer them: When the project has scheduled items the project will be deferred until the earliest scheduled items date. Otherwise it will still ask for a date. I also created an automated version of this deferring logic.

I use this shortcut via Back Tap for easy access.
Update: This works awesome with Federico’s CAPS Shortcut and the Action Button.

The shortcut also works with multiple selected items. But the handling isn’t ideal. It assumes that either all items are deferred or not deferred - not mixed.

Get the shortcuts

You need to manually create the Deferred tag in Things for the shortcut to work.

• Automation: Handle Things Deferred
• Defer Things Item

Also checkout my auto defer shortcut.