Offer Est. Time in OF for difficulty

[emsariel]

Right now, Difficulty can be set by putting a code (LOW, etc) into the title of an OF task; it can also be set by the use of specially-named contexts.

Everyone works differently, but even in Habitica I have tended to set the difficulty in the following way because I use the Pomodoro technique:

• Trivial: a few minutes; I can do several of these in a pomodoro.
• Easy: less than 1 pomodoro.
• Medium: 1-4 pomodoros.
• Hard: 5+ pomodoros (half a day or more)

That made me wonder about using estimated time in OF for Difficulty. You could have the user set the mapping on Setup (complicated!) or just set some codes - 1m = trivial, 1h = easy, etc.

This is certainly speculative. I'm not sure how accessible or readable that data is in OF's data storage, and I think you've got to turn some settings on to even see that field regularly. But it might a) work well for others using the Pomodoro technique, and b) help with that last Issue about using contexts for Attributes.

[matthewspear]

Ranges could be used to check which category it falls into and then apply the relevant habit trigger.

Personally I very rarely use the estimated time fields as they take extra time to fill in as opposed to context which I have to set before they are remove from my inbox.

A good starting point will be with Script Editor > Open Dictionary... > OmniFocus, have a look into some of the available methods and values you can access.

[emsariel]

I'll check the script dictionary for OF, good idea. My reluctance with this method is that if you really respect the times, and then bake into the script the time ranges, you're committing to the Pomodoro method. Someone who just wants to decide that a task is HARD even though it took them 15 minutes will either need to fake the time or use the other method.