It was just a month or so ago that was thinking I needed a good way to take particular OmniFocus lists with me on my watch, because I love ditching my phone when I can.
Lo and behold, Cheatsheet, an app I love, just added Shortcuts support. This means I can very easily create a list from OmniFocus and put it in a cheat, making it ready to take with me (requires Cheatsheat's Pro in-app purchase, but well worth it).
What's great about this is that I can make a complication that gets me right to this portable list of mine. Now, of course, I can't check stuff off, because it's just text, but it's a super convenient way of carrying a list to go.
A few bits about the Shortcut:
- Tune the Find Items OmniFocus action as you see fit. Yes, I could have done import questions, but there are so many different dimensions of how to select tasks to include that that didn't seem to make sense (I just use available tasks with a particular tag, but you could involve flags, dates, and any other number of things).
- Feel free to adjust how the text is passed to the cheat for each task. I used an ASCII circle to make each line feel OmniFocusesque, and also added blank lines between each, but you might want to personalize here.
- Pick the right Shortcut version. I made one for OmniFocus 3 as well as for those folks who might be running on the OmniFocus 4 beta.
- One thing you could do is set up a folder in Cheatsheet for this cheat, and then add actions to the beginning of the Shortcut to get and delete all cheats from that folder when you run it. The reason for this is intentionally enforcing a temporary kind of use here, which I am fond of. A setup like this doesn't lend well to Shortcut distribution, however, so I left it out.
Lastly, for anyone who thinks as much as I do about these things and since I did get some questions on Twitter, some thoughts about why I think Cheatsheet is great for this compared to other apps I could do this in:
- Drafts: This could surely be done in Drafts, but to me, Drafts is not a place I refer back to, it's where text starts™️.
- OmniFocus flagged: Sure, I could just flag stuff to show up in the flagged spot in OF itself, but that risks polluting what flags mean. And then what if I don't do stuff? Do I unflag? Re-flag?
- Reminders: Honestly, it's a miracle on some days that I can keep one productivity system going, adding another seems dangerous. Even if for one use case, it's risky. It feels like getting a bag of Skittles, but just for the yellow ones. That whole bag is getting eaten, no matter what I tell myself.
Anyway, enough of the preamble, here are the Shortcuts!
