Preferences

General

  • Text Size

    To better accommodate your display size and workflow, OmniFocus offers several text size options. There are five granular settings between small and large, with medium set as the default.

  • Outlining

    Users of OmniFocus 1 will be familiar with “Classic Mode” outlining, governing the behavior of common keyboard actions when items in the main outline are selected. OmniFocus 2 brings an alternative mode, and you can switch between them here.

  • Capture

    Set a custom keyboard shortcut for Quick Entry here (the default is Control-Option-Space). Use the Clippings Shortcut button to open System Preferences and set up your system-wide keyboard shortcut for Clippings (more info is available in the Clippings section).

Organization

  • Clean up inbox items which have:

    You can choose Organize ▸ Clean Up (Command-K) to help keep your view tidy by moving items with changed status or metadata to their correct locations. This preference governs which changes to an item’s data cause it to be swept up in the cleanup process.

  • Clean up changed items:

    If you’d prefer that items be cleaned up as soon as their status changes, choose Immediately. Otherwise, items will be cleaned up when you switch between perspectives or when you invoke a cleanup manually.

  • New projects and action groups are:

    Choose Sequential if you tend to create projects whose actions must be completed in a specific order, or choose Parallel if your projects and groups are often closer to basic lists.

  • In perspectives without project hierarchy:

    If you’d prefer to display items completely detached from the projects or groups they belong to when you’re looking at Contexts or a custom perspective without project hierarchy, uncheck the box for this preference .

Dates & Times

  • “Due Soon” is in the next:

    OmniFocus displays actions and projects that are due soon with an amber title and status circle. What “due soon” means is up to you—the default is two days away from the present, but you can pick a different value here.

  • Default time for defer dates:

    When you create an action or project with a “deferred until” date but no specific time, OmniFocus helpfully provides one for you. Use this preference to pick a default time for defer dates that most suits your needs.

  • Default time for due dates:

    As with the previous preference, you have free reign over the time that your actions and projects come due by default (when only a date is assigned).

  • By default, review projects every:

    While you can set custom review intervals for specific projects, it’s good to have a default setting for when you’d like to review new schemes that you’ve added to OmniFocus. This preference governs when and how often projects will show up in your Review queue by default.

Notifications

  • Show reminders:

    How visibly do you want OmniFocus remind about items you’ve decided are relevant? This preference adds some visual oomph to let you know what’s going on, by:

    • Badging the OmniFocus icon in your dock with a number equal to the items you’ve chosen to be reminded about (based on the Remind about section below)

    • Equipping the OmniFocus sidebar with badges displaying due soon and overdue items in projects and contexts (for any perspective that displays them)

    • Sending notifications to Apple’s OS X notification center to appear as you’ve configured System Notifications to behave (notifications are sent based on your choices in Remind about below)

  • Highlight perspectives:

    When there are items asking for your attention in one of the built-in perspectives, OmniFocus can give you a subtle reminder by adding a colored bar to the left edge of the perspective’s tab. Use this preference to choose which perspectives can be highlighted when something relevant comes up.

  • Remind about:

    Use this preference to choose the types of events you’d like to be alerted to. (this choice is applicable to the badge count in your OmniFocus dock icon and the notifications sent to Notification Center).

    You can choose to be reminded about items that are overdue, due soon, or flagged.

  • Publish due items as calendar alarms:

    If you’d like to be notified about due items on a device without OmniFocus but with the ability to subscribe to calendars, you can set up OmniFocus to publish a calendar to your database’s sync server location that you can then subscribe to in any app that supports iCalendar files with an ‘.ics’ extension.

    Upon choosing a setting other than Off, a calendar containing alarms corresponding to the due dates of your actions and projects will be created in the same remote sync folder that contains your database. This may take a little while; you can verify that it’s in place (or subscribe to the calendar on your Mac) by clicking Subscribe. The address that appears is the one you’ll want to use when subscribing from other devices as well.

Warning
When choosing a location to store a subscribed calendar, you may see iCloud as an available location (this is the default location in OS X’s Calendar app, for example). Storing a calendar in iCloud that syncs with your OmniFocus database can lead to some annoying and repetitive password prompts, so we recommend storing it locally on the device where you’d like to receive the alerts instead.

Synchronization

  • Don’t Sync

    This setting isn’t recommended, but if you plan to use OmniFocus exclusively on your Mac and syncing to a remote server is prohibitive, you can choose to disable OmniFocus’s sync features. In all other cases, having a cloud-based copy of your data is a great way to rest at ease that your work won’t be lost in a local catastrophe.

  • Omni Sync Server

    Omni maintains a set of servers designed to interface cleanly with OmniFocus, providing unique features like Mail Drop and support for your needs as an OmniFocus user. We recommend this as the best sync solution for most users, since it’s the one we can provide the most support for; it also happens to be free!

  • Advanced (WebDAV)

    If you choose to entrust your data with the Omni Sync Server, we’ll treat it with utmost care and responsibility (see our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy). That said, if you have exceptional security needs or other privacy concerns, you may want to use a third party WebDAV server (or set up your own). That’s great! Find out more about syncing to a custom WebDAV server in Other WebDAV Options.

    When you’ve chosen a sync preference, a field appears beneath the sync choices for entering the server address. You can sync immediately with the Sync Now button, and view a list of devices registered to sync with the chosen database by clicking the gear button. Choose Send Settings via Email to create a handy message that’ll help configure sync on your other devices.

Update

  • Check for updates (Omni Store Only):

    OmniFocus is naturally curious about when updates are available for itself. If you’d prefer for the app not to check for updates automatically, uncheck the box for this preference; otherwise, you can choose an interval that suits you best (it’s not a very intrusive or bandwidth-heavy process). You can check for updates manually using the Check Now button, or with Check for Updates in the OmniFocus menu.

  • Send anonymous system information to The Omni Group

    If you’d like to help us improve future versions of OmniFocus for you and others, you can choose to send us anonymous information about your system when you check for updates to the app. Click Learn more about what kind of information is sent to see a list of exactly what info is collected, and learn how it’s used.