Kourosh Dini's "Creating Flow with OmniFocus" recommends adding OmniFocus (referred to as OF from hereon) links to the note section of actions. This helps separate projects and the actual task required to complete the project. This segregation also helps with decluttering Forecast perspectives, because you can add a due date to the task associated with the project instead of a due date on the project. This means that your Forecast perspective won't be cluttered with 15 actions (which all live inside a project) all being due at once.
This workflow was made easier due to OF3's 'Copy as OmniFocus Link' feature in the context menu. However, it is not as easy to do on iOS. While you can press the 'Share' function on any project or action and copy its OF link, any OF project or action can share up to 5 different outputs. This means there are a lot of taps required just to access its link.
In response to this, I created a shortcut that has served me well. It only has 4 actions, so I feel comfortable writing out the steps here (in the future, I may include screenshots. For now, I feel lazy).
Get OmniFocus Link:
- Accepts
Text and URLs - Get
Item at Index4fromShortcut Input - Show notification
Copied Text "Item from List" - Copy
Item from Listto clipboard
While Step 3 may be considered redundant, I feel reassured I'm getting what I want every time I invoke the shortcut. It would be awkward if the shortcut was to break one day and I didn't know what content I was yanking to my clipboard.
Sometimes, the best shortcuts are utility shortcuts. They don't do anything profound, but aid immensely with the creation of new shortcuts. I was only able to achieve Step 2 because of a meta-shortcut called 'Output Inspector'. It previews the type and content of items being shared in the share menu. I will discuss its function in another post.
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