Focused 1.8 wasn’t intended as a big feature update, but still adds a few visible features in addition to some important internal changes.

Updated Scheduling

I’ve moved the scheduling options for tasks around, and added new options. Tasks can now have the following scheduling states:

• Planned: This is for tasks that are intended to be done on a specific date. These tasks are counted towards the daily limits, and are rescheduled by the “Clean Up” function. I’m using this for most of my tasks for the coming days and weeks.
• Anytime: This state was previously called “Next” and is meant for smaller tasks that don’t require real work to finish, but you still don’t want to forget about. They are not counted towards your limits and they are not rescheduled, but are always displayed in “Today”. I’m using it for shopping lists or smaller tasks like “watering the plants”.
• Next: This state was previously called “Later” and is meant for tasks you have yet to schedule.
• Later: This is a new state, and is meant for tasks that you want to do “maybe someday”.
• This Evening: Also a new feature, but isn’t so much of a separate schedule, but any tasks marked for this evening is sorted to the bottom of the “Today” list until the next day.

New Daily Task Limits

This update adds the option to disable the global task limit completely, but more importantly adds the option to set individual limits for each area, project and tag. And all of these are available from the settings view.

To make this work well, I’ve rewritten the clean up logic. Additionally any “Defer” and “Clean Up” are now two separate things, and “Defer” will simply move the task to the next day – which I think is more intuitive.

You can still enable automatic clean up to make sure the days are kept under your limits, even after deferring tasks.

Sidebar Improvements

The sidebar (or main list on the iPhone) got the option to switch between areas + projects and tags, allowing you to view a tasks for specific tags.

Less obvious, but just as important: I’ve dropped the standard SwiftUI lists, which caused so many issues with Drag & Drop and Reordering, especially on iOS, in favour of a very custom implementation. This means both Drag & Drop and Reordering now works not just on macOS, but also on iOS and visionOS.

Widgets & Intents

The widgets also got a big makeover.

In addition to the new design, the “Today” widget is now the “Task List” widget and allows you to pick any of your lists (including Today) as a source and filter by tags.

You can get Focused for iOS and macOS here.