Throughout this manual you’ll find information to help you get the most out of an app designed from the ground up with your productivity in mind. OmniFocus is a great way to organize, plan, and accomplish the goals in your life, and with OmniFocus 2 for Mac there’s never been a better time to dive in and see what it’s all about. We’re glad to have you with us!

What is OmniFocus?

It all starts with a basic idea. You have something that needs to get done, and you know you’d better make a note about it somewhere, but that sticky note on your desk isn’t going to cut it anymore. You’re ready to try a more reliable system, one that can keep track of all the things going on in your head, and maybe even help them feel a bit more simple in the process.

OmniFocus is the personal task management tool that helps you keep track of all the goals, plans, errands, and aspirations that come up in your life. Whether the task at hand is something small, such as setting a reminder to swing by the bike shop after work, or the tasks are part of a bigger goal, such as making plans for that long overdue vacation, OmniFocus helps you keep track of everything you need to do throughout your day.

Available on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, OmniFocus is packed full of tools to help you prioritize steps within complex projects or simply jot a quick to-do list for a weekly meeting. OmniFocus works great as a standalone productivity aid or in conjunction with whatever time- and task-management scheme suits your personal style.

OmniFocus for Mac complements OmniFocus for iOS, serving as your base of operations for productivity that extends well beyond the screen of your Mac.

For a video tour of the features of OmniFocus, check out:

http://www.omnigroup.com/video/omnifocus

Inside OmniFocus is another great resource to help you get up to speed with the wide variety of ways OmniFocus can be used to help you get things done.

When you first launch a version of OmniFocus that's compatible with the new database format, or choose Migrate Database... from the File menu, you'll see the Migration window that lists any clients that still need to be updated to the latest version to allow for the database migration to work.

If you're running a very old version of OmniFocus on a device that syncs with your current database, it may not be eligible for migration to the new database format. If this is the case, it will be indicated in a separate section of the Migration window. You'll be asked to disconnect any ineligible clients (choose Show Devices and Unregister those that aren't eligible) before proceeding with the upgrade.

When all of your Macs with OmniFocus are at version 2.6 or later and your iOS devices are at version 2.15 or later, the Migration window gives the green light to make the transition to the new, improved database format. Choose Migrate Database, and voila! OmniFocus syncs your database in the new format to all of your devices. If you choose Later, you'll be prompted to migrate again in one day (and you can always use the Migrate Database... File menu item to migrate sooner).

On the small chance that something goes missing during the migration process, before changing formats OmniFocus automatically makes a backup of your database that you can revert to if needed. We've prepared support articles with more detail on the migration and backup restoration process, and you can always contact us with any additional questions.

However, if you choose not to sync the first time you launch OmniFocus 2, you’ll have the option to migrate an existing database from OmniFocus 1. This doesn’t remove your old database (it just copies it over), so again, we recommend syncing to avoid later confusion and conflicts between multiple versions of your database.

Importing your Archive

After you’ve used OmniFocus 2 for a while, you’ll be prompted to archive parts of your database that aren’t relevant to your current set of projects (you can also create an archive manually by choosing Move Old Data to Archive from the File menu). If you have OmniFocus 1 installed on your Mac, OmniFocus 2 will check the default location for an OmniFocus 1 archive, and if it finds one, ask if you’d like to move it into OmniFocus 2’s sandbox and add your new archive data to it.

Changing Terminology

To help better represent their function, a few things have changed about how OmniFocus describes certain features of the app.

• Start dates are now defer dates. This is to more accurately capture the intent that an item shouldn’t be considered until a later time—it’s been deferred.

• Next actions are now first available actions. This helps explain view options more clearly, and helps further disambiguate sequential projects, parallel projects, and single action lists.

• Project and Context-based perspectives have become Use Project Hierarchy and Don’t Use Project Hierarchy, respectively. This is to better reflect the role this choice plays in affecting other aspects of a custom perspective’s view settings.

To get started with OmniFocus you can continue browsing the help, or dive right in to the app. If you’re starting fresh with a blank slate, you’ll see the tutorial project ready to offer some initial pointers. You can add the tutorial to your database at any time with the Help ▸ Add Tutorial Project menu item.

Standard and Pro

OmniFocus 2 gives you the power to engage with OmniFocus in ways even more uniquely tailored to your needs. We made the Standard edition of OmniFocus 2 for Mac with the idea that it has everything you need to get started “out-of-the-box”, including the vast majority of features covered in this manual.

In OmniFocus 2 Standard, you’ll:

• Use the powerful set of built-in perspectives to manage your projects and contexts, see what’s coming up with Forecast, set up regular project reviews, and more.

• Add to and access your actions anywhere in the app with Quick Entry and Quick Open, use the redesigned sidebar and inspector to easily select and edit your data, and see the state of your items with a glance at their status circles in the main outline.

• Switch between the standard fluid layout and a customizable set of columns to show just what you need in the main outline.

• Extend the capabilities of OmniFocus with email input from Mail Drop, sync between your devices with Omni Sync Server (or another WebDAV server), view external calendars alongside your to-dos, and add all manner of notes and file attachments.

In the following chapters you’ll get a full look at everything OmniFocus 2 Standard offers. It’s a heck of a lot!

In addition to the Standard feature set there are some specialized tools that appeal to users who’d like more increased view flexibility and workflow customization, and that’s why we made OmniFocus Pro.

When you try OmniFocus Pro, you’ll be able to:

• Create custom perspectives, and completely configure the sidebar to display just the perspectives you want, in the order you want.
• Focus on individual projects and folders that require your undivided attention.
• Configure the layout of your perspectives to show just the data that’s most relevant. Show and hide columns on a case-by-case basis, defer to the original fluid layout, or set an app-wide default view.
• Incorporate AppleScript into your workflow to automate common tasks, or extend the inter-app functionality of OmniFocus even further.

How to Try Pro

You can download the trial version of OmniFocus from our website. At any time throughout the trial period you can switch between Standard and Pro using Free Trial Mode ▸ Try Pro/Standard Edition in the OmniFocus menu to compare features and see which is the right fit for your needs.

Likewise, if you purchased OmniFocus 2 Standard from the Mac App Store you can download the trial version and run it side by side to compare features.

If you own a Standard license from the Omni store and would like to try Pro, if you’re still within the trial period you can temporarily delete your license (Licenses in the OmniFocus menu) to revert to trial mode and give Pro a try. If you’re outside the trial period, contact us and we’ll be happy to provide a Pro trial license.

If you have any specific comments you’d like to send us about the documentation, please do. You can drop us an email message via our Support queue, or you can ping us on Twitter; we’re @OmniWranglers.

Finally, we’d like to thank you for taking the time to read the docs.

If you’re planning to sync, it’s recommended to do so as part of the app setup process to ensure as smooth a transition as possible between versions, and to provide that added layer of backup right away. If you choose to set up sync later, the same preferences you saw at first launch are available in OmniFocus ▸ Preferences ▸ Synchronization.

Get started by creating a new Omni Sync account here:

https://manage.sync.omnigroup.com

While we’re not able to provide comprehensive support for WebDAV servers we don’t administrate (since it isn’t our software), we’re glad to help you get started with some pointers.

See this support article for a tutorial on setting up your own OmniFocus sync server using Server.app (included with Mac OS X Server).

Another option for self-hosting your own sync server is WebDAVNav Server, a free server application (see the corresponding support article). Please recall that we can't provide troubleshooting assistance for third party apps or services, so once again we recommend Omni Sync Server unless you're running OmniFocus in extraordinary circumstances.

We’ve also built in an automatic sync mechanism. With sync turned on, OmniFocus sends new changes to the sync server after one minute, or when opening or closing the app. At a bare minimum, OmniFocus checks in with the server every hour if nothing has changed on the device. This helps ensure that your data from OmniFocus is always safe, secure, and most importantly—up to date.

If you’ve made changes you want to view immediately on other devices, you’ll want to perform a manual sync (by clicking the Sync button in OmniFocus) before switching to OmniFocus on another device. This pushes your latest changes up to the sync server, so that when you launch OmniFocus on the other system, all you have to do is click or tap Sync to ensure that all of your changes are there.

Encryption is done by OmniFocus on your Mac or iOS device at the time the database is transmitted to the sync server. This means that regardless of the sync destination (Omni Sync Server or another WebDAV server), encryption-based security is preserved. OmniFocus doesn't actively encrypt data while in storage on your local device, instead deferring to any system-level encryption you have in place.

Technical details of the encryption scheme for OmniFocus can be found in this forum post.

This section of Sync Details indicates whether your database is encrypted with your sync password, or a separate one. When you click Change Passphrase, you are prompted to enter your current passphrase (this is the same as your sync password). You can then set and confirm a new passphrase used to encrypt your database on the server.

After setting a new encryption passphrase the Encryption settings indicate that your sync and encryption passwords are distinct. You can unify them again by clicking Link Passwords, or change the encryption passphrase to something new with Change Passphrase.

What follows is a guided tour of the various parts of the app interface you’ll interact with regularly in the process of getting stuff done.

The Toolbar

The toolbar at the top of your OmniFocus window contains icons for commonly used app functions that you’d like to have accessible at the click of a button. The default toolbar includes buttons or fields for:

• Showing and hiding the sidebar
• Adding a new action or a new inbox item
• Cleaning up the contents of your main outline
• Showing the Quick Open window
• Focusing on the currently selected project (Pro)
• Showing the View Options for your current perspective
• Sharing the current selection with another app via the share extension
• Searching in the main outline or across your entire database
• Showing and hiding the Inspector relevant to your current selection
• Prompting OmniFocus to Sync with a remote database

Customizing the Toolbar

Secondary click on the toolbar to reveal a contextual menu that contains the Customize Toolbar command, or choose it from the View menu. You’ll see a sheet with a multitude of buttons you can drag into place in the toolbar to suit your workflow.

You can choose whether to display toolbar icons, text, or both, and toggle between large and small versions of the icons.

Perspective Tabs

All of your to-dos in OmniFocus live in a database behind the scenes. Perspectives are how you look at and interact with the contents of that database. OmniFocus 2 for Mac comes with six built-in perspectives that represent specialized, commonly-used view states specifically designed to help you organize, prioritize, schedule, and review your tasks.

You can browse your visible perspectives using the tabs on the left side of the OmniFocus window. By default this includes:

• The Inbox, where you’ll stash all the tasks and to-dos that come to mind for later processing.
• Projects, where related tasks are grouped together into overarching plans and hierarchies.
• Contexts, the places, people, things, and states of mind most relevant or conducive to accomplishing your tasks.
• Forecast, where you can view your tasks chronologically and integrate them into your schedule.
• Flagged, where tasks designated with the most important priority or visibility are gathered.
• Review, the place to regularly check up on your progress and determine the status of projects.

The Sidebar

Nestled between the main outline and the perspective tabs lives the magical land known as the sidebar. It appears when viewing each built-in perspective other than the inbox, and provides a powerful, high-level means for surveying what’s on your plate. The function of the sidebar for each built-in perspective is discussed in the chapter for that perspective.

The sidebar can be collapsed and hidden using the sidebar button in the toolbar, or by dragging the handle in the bottom bar to the left, with the View ▸ Hide Sidebar menu item, or with the shortcut Option-Command-S.

The Focus Bar

When you’re in a special mode of the app where only a subset or nonstandard implementation of your database is visible, a bar will appear beneath the toolbar to indicate the mode that you’re in.

The most common case in which the bar appears is when you’re focusing (in OmniFocus Pro). A bar also appears to notify you when:

• Viewing an archive
• Viewing a backup
• Viewing a foreign database

The Main Outline

This is where you’ll view, add, and manipulate the tasks you’re working on at a given moment. What you see here is based on which perspective you’re viewing, what you have selected in the sidebar, whether you’re focusing on something, and more—you can narrow your concentration on just a few things you’d like to accomplish in the near term, or get a broad overview of the tasks ahead across a number of projects.

The main outline displays a list of items—inbox items, projects, actions, or groups—that fit the criteria you’ve established with your other view parameters. Each item displays associated information that’s the most relevant info you’ve entered about it.

Status Circles and What They Mean

Items you’re looking at in the main outline have circles next to them. These are called status circles. Some may may be colored, have dots in the center, a jaunty little flag icon in the corner, or even appear solid with a check mark in the middle: these display the various states an item can be in for quick reference as you view your list of tasks.

The figure above shows many common visual states of the status circle, including from top to bottom:

• Flagged—orange circle and corner flag
• Due Soon—amber circle
• Overdue—red circle
• Unstyled—grey circle
• Repeating—dots in center
• Flagged, Due Soon, and Repeating—halved amber/orange circle with flag and dots
• Completed—solid with check mark

The Inspector

The right side of the OmniFocus window is the domain of the inspector. This handy spot is where you view (“inspect”) the details of an item or context you’ve selected in the sidebar or the main outline.

You can show and hide the inspector using the inspect button in the toolbar, dragging the right handle in the bottom bar, with the View ▸ Hide Inspector menu item, or with the keyboard shortcut Option-Command-I.

The Bottom Bar

The bottom bar contains tools for quick access to commands based on your current perspective, as well as a summary of the contents of your main outline.

• Handles to collapse and expand the sidebar and inspector.

• A summary of the contents of the main outline, letting you know at a glance how many projects, contexts, and actions are being displayed.

• When in Projects or Contexts, the plus button adds items relevant to your current perspective.

• The gear menu provides a host of tools for manipulating your sidebar selection, primarily in Projects and similar perspectives.

The Inbox is the hub of all activity, and is the catch-all space for depositing just about everything that’s on your mind, no matter how big or small. The things that you’d like to do—tasks, to-dos, aspirations, plans, chores, life goals—all have a home in OmniFocus. You can throw any stray thought into your Inbox.

One of the best ways to get familiar with OmniFocus is to sit down and do a “brain dump” into your Inbox. Let OmniFocus be your “brain away from brain” for when you can’t remember that really important thing you need to do by next Monday.

Inbox Items

The things you create are placed in your Inbox, and are known as Inbox items. Some of these Inbox items are so simple that you can knock them off while they still reside in your Inbox. For example, let’s say you create an Inbox item to remind you to change the lightbulb in your workshop. That’s a simple enough task that you can do it at any time.

This Inbox item doesn’t need to be part of the Household Chores project, and adding the Home context seems like overkill. Instead, you just leave this item in your Inbox as a constant reminder to yourself that you need to change the lightbulb in your workshop, especially before you plan to use any power tools.

Some items, though, are worth categorizing and providing fine details so that you have all the information you need at hand when you’re in a particular place or focusing on completing a particular project.

Actions

Most of the Inbox items you create ultimately end up as actions. This happens when you decide that an item is part of a larger goal—a Project—and you file it away with similar to-dos (more on this in the Projects and Contexts sections).

Each action has a Status Circle on its right edge for marking it complete. When you check an item as completed, it’s moved from the list of available items to the list of Completed items and becomes invisible under the default View options.

Once you’ve assigned an Inbox item to a project, it becomes an action that you can see in the Projects or Contexts views, or in any custom perspective you’ve assigned it to.

To edit the details of an action, select it and add data right in the main outline. You can also use the Inspector for even greater control.

You can enrich the information you include with an action by adding Notes and attachments, such as images and audio recordings. You’ll find more information about these in Notes and Attachments. You can also set due dates, defer dates, and repeat intervals for actions—for the details, see Dates and Times.

Cleaning Up

When you mark an item complete by clicking its Status Circle, the item doesn’t immediately disappear. Rather, it appears checked off until you do something that tells OmniFocus to “clean up”, such as switching to the Projects or Contexts perspective. You can choose what causes OmniFocus to clean up automatically in the Organization preferences.

If you find that checked items are getting in your way (look at you, completing things!), you can either click the Clean Up button in the toolbar, or by using the Command-K keyboard shortcut.

If a completed item doesn’t disappear even after you’ve cleaned up your current view, check View Options. It’s likely that the view is set to All. Try setting the View options to Remaining or Available to tidily hide those completed items.

A Project is an item that’s made up of multiple actions. Projects are typically more complex than actions, and can include several related actions.

Understanding Project Types

Projects can be as elaborate as necessary, and you can specify the project type to be either Sequential, Parallel, or as a logical grouping of Single Actions.

Sequential Projects

Some projects, such as building a papier-mâché pterodactyl, require one action to be completed before the next action starts. These are Sequential projects.

Sequential projects have actions that need to be completed in a predetermined order; the first item needs to be completed before you can move on to the next. Another example of a sequential project could be a checklist that an astronaut goes through during the launch sequence. Each item in the list is dependent on the previous item’s completion.

Parallel Projects

Parallel projects consist of actions that can be completed in any order, such as picking up items at a few different locations. In a parallel project, all incomplete actions are available, and the First Available is just the first one in the list.

When viewing the Projects perspective, each project has an icon to its left that indicates the project type. These icons allow you to quickly scan a list of projects and tell which project is which type.

If you find yourself using one type more often than the other, you can change the default setting in OmniFocus ▸ Preferences ▸ Organization.

Single Action Lists

The final project type, Single Actions, isn’t really a project—it’s a list of loosely-related actions that aren’t interdependent. A Shopping List project is a good example of a Single Action list because it contains a list of things that you need to pick up at the grocery store. You can gather these items and check them off as completed (or acquired) as you make your way through the store. The order in which you collect them is irrelevant—it doesn’t matter if you pick some of them up today or tomorrow; they’re just things you know that you need to grab.

A Single Action list is often more about a state you want to generally sustain (spoiled cat, non-spoiled food, functional household), rather than a state you want to achieve (ship an app, take a vacation, find a new apartment). Another way of looking at this is that Single Action lists rarely have due dates, and they rarely get checked off as completed. The items within the Single Action list may get checked off, but the project itself is ongoing.

Project Status

When you think about the status of an Action or Group, the primary concern is whether the Action is complete. Projects are a bit different; they can be assigned one of four states:

Active

By default, all new projects have their status set to Active. This means that the project is current and ongoing.

On Hold

You can place a project On Hold at any time using the inspector, or while conducting a Review of your projects. When you place a project On Hold, what you’re essentially doing is delaying the project and its actions. If you know when the project will resume, you can adjust the schedule in the Dates inspector, or you can wait until some point in the future to adjust the schedule.

Completed

When you change the status of a project to Completed, the project itself is marked as Completed. However, this does not affect the status of any Active actions within the project; they will remain Active until their statuses are set to Completed.

Dropped

Every now and then, you’ll find that a project needs to be canceled or put off indefinitely. When that happens, you can set the project’s status to Dropped. When Dropped, the project and all of its actions are hidden, and won’t show up in any view setting other than All. This also notes that a project is slated for eventual archiving in a separate database.

Creating Action Groups

Groups can also be used to create a project within a project—an action group (also sometimes called a sub-project). If you find that you have an action that requires many steps of its own, you could split that action off as a separate project. However, a better solution could be to leave the action in its current project, and then move the related tasks underneath.

For example, when planning your move to Seattle, you realize that you need to make a house-hunting trip to find a place to live. You need to book your flights, rent a car, reserve a hotel room, and make appointments with real estate agents to find an apartment or that dream house in Alki Beach. You can create these tasks one by one, and then move the action into the Plan a house-hunting trip action.

Put another way, when you create an action group you’re creating a parent-child hierarchical relationship between an action and the actions nested within it. If the desired parent and children are actions that already exist, this can be done by selecting the soon-to-be child actions and:

• Dragging them on top of the parent action so the parent action is selected and shows a vertical insertion line indented beneath it, then dropping them inside, or
• Positioning them immediately below the intended parent action in the outline and choosing Organize ▸ Indent (Command-]).

If either the group’s parent action or its child actions have yet to be created, there are two other ways to create groups.

• To create a group from an existing action intended as its parent:

  Create child actions from scratch by choosing Organize ▸ Add Inside (Shift-Command-]) with the intended parent action selected. A new action is created with the selected action as its parent.

• To create a group from existing actions with no existing parent action:

  Select the items you’d like to group and choose Organize ▸ Group (Option-Command-G). A new untitled action is created to represent the group, and the selected items are indented to become its children.

Once you’ve created that action group, you can change its type from Parallel to Sequential so that the next task only becomes available when you tick off the previous task. And when you’ve completed the final action for that subproject, the parent action can be checked off, too.

Grouping Projects with Folders

Occasionally, you’ll find that some of your projects are similar enough that you want to keep them together so you can look at everything in one place. These projects might have different goals, timelines, or objectives, but they contribute to the greater whole. For projects such as this, you can use Folders in OmniFocus to group multiple projects together.

To create a project folder, follow these steps:

1. Select two or more projects in the Projects perspective:

   

2. Choose Organize ▸ Group (Option-Command-G). This places the selected projects within a folder.

   

3. Enter a name for the folder to replace the New Folder text.

   

4. Press Return to accept the new folder name.

Alternatively, choose New Folder from the Plus menu beneath the projects list, or choose File ▸ New Folder while in the Projects perspective.

Marking a Project Complete

Eventually you’re going to reach the successful end of a project. When you’re sure that you’ve really accomplished “Move in to new house,” “Carve Halloween pumpkins,” or “Write pterodactyl novel,” you can mark the project complete.

Select the project and then choose Status ▸ Completed from its contextual menu, change its status in the inspector, click the Complete toolbar item, choose Edit ▸ Status ▸ Completed, or just press the Space bar. The project’s status changes to Completed, and it is filed away in your library for safekeeping.

Placing a Project On Hold

If you’re not quite sure whether you want to start (or continue) a project, you can change the project’s Status from Active to On Hold. When you place a project On Hold, the project and its actions are removed from the project list in the sidebar (if you’ve chosen to show Active projects in View options).

Every now and then, you can switch the project View option to Remaining so you can review the projects you’d like to make active, drop, or keep On Hold.

There are several ways to place a project On Hold:

• Select the project in the main outline, open the Project inspector (Option-Command-I), and then change the Status to On Hold.

  

• Select the project in the sidebar, and then choose Status ▸ On Hold from the gear menu at the bottom of the sidebar.

  

• Control- or right-click the project in the main outline or in the sidebar, and then choose Status ▸ On Hold from the contextual menu.

To switch an On Hold project to Active again:

1. Choose Perspectives ▸ Projects (Command–2).

2. Click View in the toolbar, or choose View ▸ Show View Options (Shift-Command-V) to open the View options popover menu.

3. Choose the Remaining view option. Any projects that have been placed On Hold, have been deferred or blocked, now show up in the sidebar.

   

4. Click away from the View options popover to make it disappear.

5. Select the project in the sidebar, and then use one of the following techniques to set the project’s status back to Active:

   • Select the project in the main outline, open the Project inspector (Option-Command-I), and then change the Status to Active.
   • Select the project in the sidebar, and then choose Status ▸ Active from the gear menu at the bottom of the sidebar.
   • Control- or right-click the project in the main outline or in the sidebar, and then choose Status ▸ Active from the contextual menu.

Dropping a Project

If you’ve decided not to work on a project any further, you can drop it completely. It disappears from the list in the sidebar, and its actions likewise stay hidden. Of course, you could just delete the project, but then you wouldn’t have any record of it or its actions ever having existed. Keeping them around in a dropped state means you can go back and check on how often you give up on projects, check which actions you’ve completed regardless of whether they’re from still-relevant projects, and so on.

There are several ways to drop a project:

• Select the project in the main outline or in the sidebar, and then choose Edit ▸ Status ▸ Dropped.

• Select the project in the main outline, open the Project inspector (Option-Command-I), and then change the Status to Dropped.

  

• Select the project in the sidebar, and then choose Status ▸ Dropped from the gear menu at the bottom of the sidebar.

• Control- or right-click the project in the main outline or in the sidebar, and then choose Status ▸ Dropped from the contextual menu.

To switch a Dropped project or folder to Active again:

1. Choose Perspectives ▸ Projects (Command–2).

2. Click View in the toolbar, or choose View ▸ Show View Options (Shift-Command-V) to open the View options popover menu.

3. Choose the All view option. Any projects that have been Dropped now show up in the sidebar.

   

4. Click away from the View options popover to make it disappear.

5. Select the project in the sidebar, and then use one of the following techniques to set the project’s status back to Active:

   • Select the project in the main outline and choose Edit ▸ Status ▸ Active.
   • Select the project in the main outline, open the Project inspector (Option-Command-I), and then change the Status to Active.
   • Select the project in the sidebar, and then choose Status ▸ Active from the gear menu at the bottom of the sidebar.
   • Control- or right-click the project in the main outline or in the sidebar, and then choose Status ▸ Active from the contextual menu.

When you have multiple projects in the works simultaneously, Contexts help you organize actions that have something in common, regardless of which project they’re in.

For example, let’s say you’re tweaking the rocket engine you’ve been building in the backyard, and you’re stuck because you need a specific wrench. To make matters worse, the light in your workshop went out when you went searching for that wrench. You’ve added the wrench as an action in your Colonize Mars project, and you just added the lightbulb to your Household Errands project. But what’s to keep you from forgetting one or the other the next time you go to the hardware store? The answer is that while they’re part of different projects, you can associate these items with a Context.

In a perspective that uses the project hierarchy (such as the built-in Projects perspective), the simplest way to assign a context is to select the item in the outline and choose a context from the drop-down menu in the inspector — or select the Context field for the item in the main outline, if you’ve chosen to show it. Typing a context here presents options that auto-complete based on existing contexts, or offer the option to create a new one if the desired context doesn’t exist.

When in the Contexts perspective, it can be just as quick to select items in the main outline, and click and drag them to the item in the contexts list where you’d like them to reside.

Contexts, like Projects, also have a Status:

• Active
• On Hold
• Dropped

One way to think of OmniFocus’s Forecast perspective is to think of the weather (which is something we do often here in Seattle)—you want to know what it’s going to be like outside so you can plan ahead. The Forecast view gives you that same perspective by showing you how many tasks are on your plate for the week ahead. When you switch to the Forecast perspective, the sidebar lets you see what’s past due, what’s due over the next 30 days, and what is further off on the horizon.

Each date button displays the number of actions associated with that date. For due items, the count is color-coded according to the most urgent item: amber indicates that an item is due soon, and red indicates an item is due or past due. To create a new action that is due on a particular day, go to the appropriate date button, followed by the new item button.

The Forecast Sidebar

A range of dates spanning the next month is displayed in a convenient grid in the forecast sidebar, letting you know at a glance what’s on your plate in the coming weeks.

The forecast sidebar has a bunch of nifty interactions that make assigning due dates and viewing your upcoming plans a breeze.

• Click and drag on a range of dates to select them, bringing items due on those dates to view in the main outline.

  

• Command-click to select discontiguous dates—Each Saturday in the coming month, for example, to see whether your next few weekends are clear.

  

• Drag and drop an action from the outline onto a date in the sidebar to make it due that day.

  If you hold down the Command key while dragging, OmniFocus sets the Deferred Date to any dragged items. Similarly, if you hold down Option-Command while dragging, OmniFocus sets the Deferred Date and Due Date for the dragged items.

Adding Your Calendars to OmniFocus

OmniFocus also plays well with your calendars, including those you might sync through Apple’s iCloud from Calendar on OS X or iOS, Google Calendar, or any CalDAV servers to which you have subscribed. The calendars which you can view in OmniFocus are based upon the calendars that the Calendar app on your Mac can see; to add to, remove, or modify the calendars available on your Mac, use the Calendar app.

Events on your calendar show up interspersed with the daily events you’ve scheduled in OmniFocus. To view an event on your calendar, just click it for a popover that contains the details of that event. In that popover, you can also click View in Calendar to open the Calendar app on your Mac and go directly to that event.

To modify what you see in the list or to adjust the time shown for the Calendar events, click View in the toolbar. Forecast View options also include a Calendars section that lets you customize which external calendars are shown, including those stored in iCloud and more.

To flag a selected item, click on the upper-right corner of its status circle, choose the Flagged status in the inspector, or use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-L. (You can also use Shift-Command-L to unflag an item.) When you flag an item, its status circle changes from gray to orange to help catch your eye and let you know that something important is going on.

Another way for items to become flagged is by inheriting the flagged status of a parent project or group. If a project or group is flagged, all of the actions within it automatically receive an inherited flag as well: this is noted by a hollowed-out (white) flag icon attached to the action’s status circle.

Flags gained in this way can’t be directly removed; the parent item must be unflagged, or the action moved elsewhere, to lose the inherited property.

To view all of the items you’ve flagged, visit the Flagged perspective. OmniFocus conveniently brings all of your flagged items together in a nice little bundle so you can tick them off as you go.

Each project has an interval for how often you intend to review it and a date when the next review is planned. You can change the default review interval in OmniFocus ▸ Preferences ▸ Dates & Times, and you can change the review interval and next review date of individual projects with the inspector.

To review your remaining projects:

1. Choose the Review perspective in the sidebar (there’s also a corresponding button you can add to your toolbar, if you like). In this view, your remaining projects are grouped in order of their next-scheduled review date.

2. For each project, check whether it is in the proper state (Active, On Hold, Completed, or Dropped). Do you need to revise its actions, or add new ones? Should you put the project On Hold, drop it, or mark it as Completed? Or is everything moving along just fine?

   

3. Once you’re satisfied with the state of the project, select it. You’ll see that some review-specific handy controls appear at the top of the main outline—click Mark Reviewed, choose Edit ▸ Mark Reviewed, or Control-click and choose Mark Reviewed from the contextual menu. The project’s next review date moves forward and you can go on to review another project.

   

Common results after reviewing your projects include:

• Determining that it’s on course with no changes required; or,
• Adding, removing, rearranging or completing actions within the project to adapt to changes in circumstance since the last review.

You may also find you’re able to mark a project as Completed (huzzah!), decide that now’s not the time to be working on it and put it On Hold, or realize that it’s something you won’t be acting on for the foreseeable future and mark it as Dropped. For more on changing a project’s status, see the Projects chapter.

• Inbox
• Projects
• Contexts
• Forecast
• Flagged
• Review
• Completed
• Changed

The first six of these form the foundation of interacting with OmniFocus, and offer tons of power and flexibility for accomplishing things in ways that suit your needs.

The final two standard perspectives—Completed and Changed—are transient views that appear temporarily in your sidebar when chosen from the Perspectives menu and are a great way to find items in your database that may have been filed away by mistake or otherwise disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Once you’ve been exploring OmniFocus for a while you may find there are even more specialized ways that you’d like to view your tasks, whether through a specific search term, a group of projects in your sidebar, or a special sort criteria you’d like to apply to actions in a single action list. Or maybe there’s a specific productivity method you’d like to try that the default perspectives don’t fully support.

And to help you get things into your OmniFocus database, we’ve built in some handy methods to make it easier for you, including Quick Entry, Clippings, Mail Drop, and even importing a list from OmniOutliner.

Copying from Plain Text

If you’ve written a list of items elsewhere that you’d like to copy into OmniFocus (say, a grocery list typed up in Notes), OmniFocus can use line breaks to determine where one item ends and the next begins.

Just select the text you’d like to add as items and copy it (Command-C). In OmniFocus, select an item without activating any of its text fields, then paste (Command-V) to add the copied text as a list of items below the one you have selected.

Quick Entry

With an easily configurable keyboard shortcut, you can use Quick Entry from anywhere on your Mac to add items to your database as long as OmniFocus is running. Make sure the shortcut in OmniFocus ▸ Preferences ▸ General is what you want, and it’ll open the Quick Entry window no matter which app you’re viewing in the foreground.

When using Quick Entry, a couple of other keyboard interactions are affected by your Outlining choice in General preferences.

• If you decide against posting an item with Quick Entry, in Modern mode press Esc to close the window. In Classic mode, use Cancel (Command-.) instead.
• Press Return in Quick Entry to save the current item and close the window. To add another item before closing the Quick Entry window, hold down Shift and then press Return — twice if in Modern mode, once if in Classic mode.

Clippings

You may come across an email message, a web page, a newsreader article, or some other scrap of info that you’d like to turn into an OmniFocus action. In the olden days you might heft your mouse, highlight the text, copy it, summon up the OmniFocus quick entry window, and paste. But no, you’re living in the future. You use the OmniFocus Clippings service.

To clip content from another application:

• Highlight some text in any application (that is, any application that supports Mac OS X Services, which should be all applications these days, ahem).
• Press the Clippings keyboard shortcut (instructions on setting one up are below), or open the application menu and then the Services submenu, then choose OmniFocus: Send to Inbox.
• A new item, with the highlighted content (rich text and embedded images) as its note, lands in the quick entry window for you to revise and save.

Setting Up a Clippings Shortcut

At the bottom of General Preferences in OmniFocus, you’ll find a setting for the Clippings Shortcut which opens these instructions as well as opening a window for the Keyboard section of System Preferences.

In that window, you should see two panes: on the left is a list of shortcut categories, and on the right is an outline of items within that category. In the left pane, click on “Services”, and on the right scroll down until you see the group of Text services. In there, you should see an item for the OmniFocus “Send to Inbox” service. Click on that service, and an “add shortcut” button should appear which you can use to assign a keyboard shortcut.

If you have more than one copy of OmniFocus installed, you may see duplicate copies of this service—one for each installed copy of OmniFocus. You may wish to uncheck the service associated with other copies to disable them so that you don’t accidentally send your clipping to the wrong copy of OmniFocus.

Email Capture (Mail Drop)

Mail Drop is a feature of Omni Sync Server which lets you send emails directly into your OmniFocus Inbox. You can create multiple private send-to addresses to give friends, family, coworkers, or classmates the ability to create actions that land in your OmniFocus Inbox. And, best of all, you can revoke those addresses at any time.

Some possible ways to use Mail Drop include:

• Forwarding actionable emails from your PC at work
• Processing emails on your iPhone or iPad
• Using if this then that to automate all kinds of Internet-y things
• Allowing a partner to delegate actions directly into your OmniFocus system

If you’re already using the Omni Sync Server to sync OmniFocus, you can log in to the sync server web interface and create your first Mail Drop address. After logging in, just click the Create Address button to automatically generate the email address (a combination of your account name and a random string of characters, for example).

If you don’t have a Sync Server account yet, you can sign up here. The account creation process includes instructions for configuring OmniFocus to use your new account (it’s as simple as tapping or clicking a link in an email).

When you send an email message to Mail Drop, the subject line of that message becomes the name of the new Inbox item. The body of the message becomes the Note, which can contain text, attachments (such as images and files), and simple HTML (more complex formatting is removed).

Importing from OmniOutliner

OmniFocus integrates with OmniOutliner for Mac, so you can outline an agenda in OmniOutliner and then easily bring it into OmniFocus and take action. There are three ways to bring your OmniOutliner data into OmniFocus:

Import a Document

Using the File ▸ Import OmniOutliner Document menu command, OmniFocus imports an OmniOutliner outline of your choice into your OmniFocus database. The outline’s rows become OmniFocus items, and its columns become fields for those items (you can choose what OmniFocus item field corresponds to each outline column as part of the import process).

Drag and Drop

Drag a selection of rows from an OmniOutliner document onto a project or group in OmniFocus, and they’ll become actions within that project or group with hierarchy preserved. As with the Import menu command, when you release the drag OmniFocus will ask how you’d like data in the outline’s columns to be interpreted.

Copy and Paste

Select any number of rows in an Outliner document and copy them (Command-C). Paste them (Command-V) into the Inbox or into another selected OmniFocus item, and the copied rows will appear in place with hierarchy preserved. As with the Import menu command, when you paste in a valid location OmniFocus asks how you’d like data in the outline’s columns to be interpreted.

Quick Open

Command-O invokes Quick Open, the powerful way to access your perspectives, folders, projects and contexts with a few swift keystrokes. As you type, Quick Open narrows your results in real time and sorts them by relevance to the text you enter.

Searching in the Toolbar

By default, entering a term in the toolbar’s search field combs through the current contents of your main outline (“Here”) and filters items with text that matches the terms of your search.

A toolbar search looks through text in the title, note, project, and context fields of everything in the scope of the search to find matching items.

Click the magnifying glass icon to the left of the search field to change the scope of the search from the current view to either all Remaining items (things that haven't been completed or dropped), or Everything in your OmniFocus database regardless of completion status.

Find Dialog

Another way to locate a lost item in your current view is with the find dialog (Command-F). While search narrows what you see in the outline, the find dialog looks through all the fields currently visible in the main outline and highlights results instead, providing a setting for them which you can browse through until you find what you need.

Sharing

As an alternative to Clippings or Quick Entry, you can use the Share Menu in apps that support it (such as Safari) to share content with OmniFocus.

To add OmniFocus to the share menu of other apps that support the OS X share extension, visit Extensions in the System Preferences app and click the check box next to OmniFocus in the Share Menu extension. To make OmniFocus more visible, drag to rearrange it above other apps in the menu.

With the Today extension enabled, you can view items that are due soon and overdue at a glance in Notification Center, and when they’re complete, check them off right there — the items’ status updates in the app along with any changes you make.

Choose the items shown in the Today extension with OmniFocus’s Notification Preferences.

To set up interactive notifications, first visit OmniFocus Preferences and be sure that Show Reminders As Notifications is checked. Next, open Notifications in System Preferences and choose OmniFocus. Select Alerts as the type of notification you’d like to receive.

From now on, OmniFocus notifications you receive on your Mac will remain on screen until dismissed. You’ll have two options when dismissing the alert: to simply close it, or to show the location of the relevant item in OmniFocus. If you choose to show the item, it’ll be summoned in your currently active OmniFocus window (OmniFocus will launch if it was closed at the time).

OmniFocus also supports pasting plain text lists formatted in TaskPaper syntax into the open window of an OmniFocus database. So while Copy as TaskPaper can be used to share OmniFocus items with TaskPaper itself, its primary use is as an intermediary between OmniFocus and other apps that support TaskPaper's tag system.

This can be used to (for example) batch process dozens or hundreds of OmniFocus items at once, round-tripping them out from OmniFocus in the TaskPaper syntax, performing the batch processing actions, and bringing them back to OmniFocus without loss of important metadata.

OmniFocus uses the following tags to represent item attributes when copied into the TaskPaper format:

@autodone (boolean)

Indicates whether the item automatically completes itself when its children are complete.

@context (string)

The context assigned to the item, if any.

@defer (date)

The date until which the item is deferred, e.g. 2016-04-19 5pm or next Thursday -3d.

@done (date)

The date on which the item was completed.

@due (date)

The date on which the item is due.

@estimate (time span)

The estimated time needed to complete the task, e.g. 2h for 2 hours or 3w for 3 weeks.

@flagged

Denotes flagged status if the item is flagged.

@parallel (boolean)

Indicates whether the item’s children are parallel (true) or sequential (false).

@repeat-method (method)

If the item is repeating, indicates the repeat method: fixed, start-after-completion, or due-after-completion.

@repeat-rule (rule)

An iCalendar spec (ICS) repeat rule, e.g. FREQ=WEEKLY;INTERVAL=1.

Creating an Archive

After a while of using OmniFocus every day, your database may become quite large, and especially if you synchronize with a mobile device, things could get quite slow. Most of the items are probably completed or dropped items that you rarely or never need to review, so OmniFocus includes a command to archive those old items to a different file, keeping your main database sprightly and nimble.

To archive your old data, choose Move Old Data to Archive from the File menu. A sheet appears with a date field; any items completed before that date, or dropped items that haven’t been changed since that date, will be moved to the archive.

OmniFocus saves your archive file in the same place as your main database.

• Omni store version: ~/Library/Containers/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus2/Data/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus/

• Mac App Store version: ~/Library/Containers/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus2.MacAppStore/Data/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus/

Where ~ is your home folder. If you ever want to look at your archived data, just choose Open Archive from the File menu; your archive opens in its own window.

To retrieve items from an archive you’re browsing, just drag and drop them into the desired location in your main database (copy and paste works too). In either case, a copy remains behind in the archives; the archived copy can be retained as a record or manually deleted to keep things tidy.

Restoring from a Backup

We’ve made OmniFocus err on the side of obsessive, paranoid data preservation, just in case something bad happens to your database. After all, we’re asking you to put your whole life into this app. OmniFocus automatically backs up your database once every two hours, in the folder:

• Omni store version: ~/Library/Containers/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus2/Data/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus/Backups/

• Mac App Store version: ~/Library/Containers/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus2.MacAppStore/Data/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus/Backups/

OmniFocus keeps up to 100 backups of your database at a time, which comes to about 2 weeks worth if you run OmniFocus continuously (more for most people, since a backup can’t happen if OmniFocus isn’t open).

To restore a backed-up version of your database, choose Show Backups from the File menu, then double-click to choose a backup file to view. It’ll open in its own separate OmniFocus window so you can browse it and determine if it’s the one you want; if so, choose Revert to this backup in the focus bar and it’ll replace your current database.

Printing

Printing your OmniFocus data is pretty straightforward: set up a window that contains exactly the data you want by focusing, selecting items in the sidebar, or expanding and collapsing rows in the main outline. Then choose Print from the File menu. OmniFocus resizes the content to fit horizontally on the paper you’ve chosen.

To print on unusually-sized paper:

• Choose File ▸ Page Setup (Shift-Command-P).
• Make sure the Settings popup menu is set to Page Attributes.
• Choose your printer from the Format popup menu.

• See if the paper you want to use is listed in the Paper Size popup menu. If it is, choose that paper size and click OK to save your changes.

  If the paper size you need isn’t available, choose Manage Custom Sizes from the Paper Size popup menu and then use the Custom Paper Sizes window to define the page specs you need.

Exporting

Your data belongs to you; if you want to send it to other applications, run scripts on it, publish it on the web, or do other exciting stuff with it that we haven’t even thought of, you’re more than welcome to write it out to the format of your liking.

To export your database, choose File ▸ Export, and then choose a format and a location. The available formats are:

• OmniFocus Document — This is an ordinary OmniFocus document, just like the one that you use as your database. If you open such a file in OmniFocus, it appears in its own window and you can work with it normally, but settings specific to your database (such as custom perspectives and view options) don’t come along with it.

• Plain Text — This is a lightweight plain-text representation of your data, able to be opened in the text editor of your choice.

• Simple HTML — This is a single-file HTML representation of your data; the stylesheet and even the icons are embedded in the HTML. If you are proficient with CSS, you should be able to restyle the result however you like.

• Comma Separated Values (CSV and CSV UTF–16) — CSV is a kind of lingua franca for applications old and new on all platforms, as it’s just all of your data in a plain text file with its columns separated by commas. Once you have your data in CSV format, it’s easy to run scripts on it, convert it to some other format, or open it in applications that understand it (like OmniPlan!). If you’re having trouble persuading other applications to read the non-ASCII characters in your CSV file, such as accented letters or non-Roman characters, try exporting with the UTF–16 CSV option, and importing that into the other application. This makes it easier for some applications to detect the correct encoding and interpret your characters properly.

To add a note to an item, click the note icon in the main outline near the item’s title, edit the note field in the inspector, or use the Command-’ keyboard shortcut.

When a picture is worth a thousand words, try adding an attachment! With an action or project selected, choose Edit ▸ Attach File. This opens a file selection dialog, where you can browse to find the file you’d like to attach. You can choose whether to link to the file on your system, or embed it into your database (the Embed option is chosen by default). Note that if you want access to the file on your other devices you’ll want to embed it so it can sync properly (see Creating and Syncing Attachments, next).

Creating and Syncing Attachments

When adding attachments in OmniFocus for Mac, there are two ways to ensure the attachments make it across to your iPad or iPhone (or your other Macs with OmniFocus installed). The important theme here is to embed the attachments, as simply linking to them won’t work. Due to the file formats supported on iOS, not all attachments added in OmniFocus for Mac are visible in OmniFocus for iPad or iPhone.

Option 1: Attaching Files from the Edit Menu

With OmniFocus open on your Mac, select the item to which you’d like to attach something, and then select Edit ▸ Attach File in the menu bar. In the Open sheet that slides down, select the file you would like to attach, and then make sure you select the Embed the file in the document radio button before you click Select.

Option 2: Attaching Files from the Finder

To attach a file from the Finder (it’s the blue smiley-faced icon on the far left edge of the Dock on your Mac) you will need to Option-drag the file from the Finder to the note field of your item in OmniFocus. Make sure the note field is open and selected, then place the Finder window next to the OmniFocus window and select the file you want to attach by clicking on it. Hold down the Option key while pressing the mouse button. You’ll notice that when you press the Option key, the mouse pointer changes to a green circle with a plus sign inside. This is exactly what you want! Now drag that file onto your OmniFocus item, let go of the mouse button, and the file is attached.

After you have attached the file in OmniFocus on your Mac, be sure to click Sync in the toolbar. Then, when you switch to OmniFocus for iPad or iPhone, tap Sync to bring the attachments over to your other device.

The Attachment List

The Attachment List (Window ▸ Attachment List) gives you quick access to all of the files attached to your database. This can be handy for finding the little pieces of reference material you have added to your actions and projects.

The Attachment List displays a list of all of your attachments, the item that they are attached to, the file size, and the date they were added. To reveal an attachment in your OmniFocus database, double-click it in the Attachment List.

To delete an attachment that you don’t need anymore, select it in the list and then click the Delete button in the window’s lower-left corner.

By design, the items you collect in OmniFocus aren’t the same sort of thing as events or agenda items you’d list on a calendar. You’d generally use a calendar for anything that takes place at a specific time: meetings, dentist appointments, and dinner reservations would do best in your calendar because you can’t act on them until that moment.

Setting Defer and Due Dates

Actions and projects can have due dates and “defer until” dates with a less specific notion of time constraint than items in your calendar. The defer until date is the date when an action or project becomes available; until that date arrives, the item remains grayed out. The due date is the date when an action or project needs to be completed.

For example, to make progress on your Colonize Mars project, you need to know when Mars is in opposition so you can schedule a date during the launch window. A quick online search shows that the next window is from January 2016 to April 2016, so you decide to launch your spacecraft on January 6 to commemorate your birthday. To keep track of this, you might create a Launch Window action with a defer until date of January 1, 2016 and a due date of April 30, 2016.

While you’re at it, you also create a Launch Spacecraft action with a defer until date of January 6, 2016 and a due date of April 30, 2016. So why not just a due date for Launch Mission? Well, because weather conditions for a launch could be bad that day, or there could be some sort of mechanical failure that delays the launch. Regardless, that is the day you know you’d like to launch the rocket, and if that date passes, OmniFocus reminds you until you’re past the due date and off to explore the Red Planet.

Items that have not reached their defer until date are not considered available so they won’t clutter your view until you can work on them. To see all of the actions in your Colonize Mars project, choose Remaining in View options (All includes completed and dropped items). Actions with a future defer date are in gray. When the defer date arrives, the action’s text appears in black to let you know it is available and the clock is ticking.

When due dates are approaching, OmniFocus considers actions and projects to be Due Soon and represents them as such by changing their color from black to amber and adding them to the Forecast (see Forecast). By default, actions become “due soon” two days before the specified due date. To change this, go to the OmniFocus ▸ Preferences ▸ Dates & Times tab and choose a different value for “Due Soon”.

Also in the Dates & Times section of preferences, you can choose which time of day to use for when you enter a due date with no time. By default it is 5:00 PM; you could for instance enter 11:59 PM to make new items due at the very end of the day, or 9:00 AM to make new items due at the beginning of the workday.

Defer and due dates can be entered either in the main outline or in the inspector.

Actions that have reached their due date are styled in red. This serves as a warning to you that you should either get that task done, or reschedule its due date. In the case of the Mars mission, if you miss the launch window, you’ll have to wait another 24 months for your next opportunity.

Supported Date Formats

You can be pretty creative with the way you enter dates; OmniFocus is rather smart about guessing what you mean. For example:

• 2d, –3w, 1h, 1y1m, and so on — Relative dates and times put the date at a certain amount of time from right now. Negative numbers represent times in the past.

• 2 days, –3 weeks, 1 hour, 1 year 1 month, and so on — You can use the full names of units too.

• yesterday, tomorrow, tonight, next thursday, last month, this friday, and so on — You can refer to relative dates using common words. “This”, “next”, and “last” have specific meanings: this friday always means the Friday in this week, next friday always means the Friday in the next week, and last friday always means the Friday in last week, regardless of what day today is. Other units work in the same way.

• september, fri, 2019, and so on — If you enter the name of a specific time period, the date will be at its beginning. So september means September first.

• 5/23/08 10a, 9.30.09 2:00 PM, and so on — You can use the short date format as defined in your Language & Region system preferences.

• 2w sat, 4d @ 5p, mon 6a, aug 6 tue 5p, and so on — Mix the available formats however you like.

• now, 9, 14:00, tom, and so on — OmniFocus makes its best guess at things like bare numbers, times, and word fragments. If you think something might work, give it a try.

Repeating Items

Some tasks occur on a regular basis. Instead of creating a new item every time you need to take out the recycling, you can set that task up so that you’re reminded every Thursday night to put the recycling bins by the road for pickup Friday morning. Repeating actions can occur regularly—every few hours, days, weeks, or months—based on when the item was first scheduled, or rescheduled to be deferred until (or be due again) based on a set time after you mark it completed.

To set an item up to repeat:

• Select the item you want to repeat.

• Choose a Repeat type from the list in the Repeat pane of the inspector.

  • Repeat Every—With the initial due date as its starting point, the item will come due again at the lapsing of each repeat interval, like clockwork. This is useful for repeating items that are locked to the calendar, like paying the rent. This is the repeat type for most common uses.

  • Defer Another—When the item is completed, it’s deferred for another instance of the repeat interval. This is useful for repeating items that can’t be considered again until a specific amount of time has passed—when your scheduling has to be flexible because it’s regulated by some external constraint. If your insurance covers dentist check-ups every six months, for example, you’ll want to make an appointment later in the year based on the date of your previous one.

  • Due Again—When the item is completed, it’s due again after the repeat interval has elapsed. This is most useful for items with internally set constraints based on the time they take (or require) to complete. Refilling a 30-dose medical prescription every 30 days is an example of this type of repeat.

• Enter a repeat interval. This can be any number of minutes, hours, days, months, or years.

• To schedule an action on specific weekdays, enter a Repeat Every interval in weekly increments and then select the days on which you’d like to repeat the item from the buttons below.

For example:

• Defer until Tuesday 5:00 PM; due Tuesday 10:00 PM; repeat every 1 week: take out the trash. This repeats on a fixed schedule because it is necessary to do it at the same time every week, regardless of when you last did it.

• Defer until today 12:00 AM; due today 6:00 PM; defer another 5 days: clean the kitchen. This is deferred from the completion date because the next time you need to do it depends on the last time you did it.

• Defer until 4:00 PM; due 6:00 PM; repeat every 1 week on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday: bring Sarah to soccer practice. This repeats on certain weekdays, available toward the end of the workday so you aren’t distracted by it until you need the reminder.

• Defer until today 7:00 AM; due today 7:00 PM; due again in 10 days: water the cactus. This prickly fellow risks drowning if watered too frequently, and using “due again” ensures this won’t happen even if the action becomes overdue before you complete it (“repeat every”, by contrast, would prompt you to do it again sooner than would be safe).

When you mark a repeating item as complete, the next instance of it is created with its start and due dates pushed forward as indicated by the repeat interval. If you want an item to stop repeating, just turn off the Repeat setting in the inspector.

To Focus:

1. Select a project or folder (or any combination of projects and folders) in the sidebar or main outline.

2. Click the Focus toolbar button, choose View ▸ Focus on (Selected Items) (Shift-Command-F).

Everything outside your selection disappears from the sidebar, the title at the top of the window changes to Focusing on (Selected Items), and the focus bar appears beneath the toolbar to indicate that you’re in a special view of your database.

As you move between perspectives, OmniFocus ignores everything outside of your focus, as if the items you’re focusing on are the only items in your library.

When you’re done focusing, choose View ▸ Unfocus (Shift-Command-F), or click the Unfocus button in the focus bar. Your library comes back as if nothing ever happened!

You can add scripts that live in your OmniFocus toolbar by placing them in the directory accessible from the Help ▸ Open Scripts Folder menu item.

Check out the resources below to get started with ideas, tips, and help for adding automation to your OmniFocus workflow:

• AppleScript discussion on the official OmniFocus Forums.

• An AppleScript overview, tips, and an extended list of resources can be found at Inside OmniFocus.

• 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).

• 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.

• Fluid

  The fluid layout option is the classic OmniFocus 2 layout, displaying information related to items in your OmniFocus database in a row beneath the item title.

• Custom Columns

  The custom columns option provides configurable presentation of your data based on just what’s relevant to you. Data is displayed in columns on the same line as item titles, and these columns can be selectively shown or hidden with the check boxes in this section.

• Font collection

  Choose the font package that applies to text in views on your OmniFocus database. Proxima Nova is the default sans serif collection; Georgia is included as an alternative with serifs, as is the System Font (San Francisco).

  The slider beneath the selection menu offers scaling font size for easy readability or higher data density.

• Color palette

  Choose a themed set of colors to apply to your OmniFocus interface. Two styles (OmniFocus Light and OmniFocus Dark) are included by default.

• Sharing

  Choose Import Style to bring custom .ofocus-style themes into OmniFocus, where they will be added to the dropdown font collection and color palette menus where appropriate.

  Choose Export Current Style to create an .ofocus-style file representing the currently selected font collection, color palette, or both. This file can be used as a base for custom edits, or imported to add additional user-created themes to OmniFocus.

• “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.

• 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.

• Show in Today:

  With the Today extension turned on, you can fine-tune the list of items you see when you look at Today in Notification Center. Control your workflow by choosing one or more criteria for actions that appear in Today. Items that can be shown include Overdue, Due Today (the default), Deferred Until Today, Flagged, and Inbox Items.

• 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.

• 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.

With OmniFocus sync set up on your Mac, choose Show Sync Details... for advanced information about the connected sync account, including:

• A list of Devices currently syncing to the account. Selecting a device shows how recently it synced to your OmniFocus database, and provides the option to unregister it as an approved sync client.
• Push-triggered sync options, with push enabled by default. Technical details of your push connection are shown here, along with advanced options (primarily used for troubleshooting). The Learn More link connects to a support article with details on how push works, and why even the most data security-conscious users will likely want to leave it enabled.
• A sync Log with a list of all your recent OmniFocus database sync activity, and the reasons for each sync event along with their durations. If anything seems strange here, you can copy the log for use when contacting Omni support.
• Details about the Encryption status of your data on the sync server. With OmniFocus 2.6 for Mac and later (and OmniFocus 2.15 for iOS and later), OmniFocus uses an upgraded database format that encrypts your data on the server. Verify the encryption status of your sync data here, and (optionally) set up a separate passphrase for decrypting your database.

• 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.

Action

An item that’s part of a project, or part of a group within a project.

Active

The status for an item that’s planned for completion, or a context that’s currently in use.

Archive

A database of jettisoned items that you’ve decided aren’t relevant to your current plans by virtue of their age and dropped or completed status. Using an archive helps keep your main database easy to sync and search, while providing a historical document that’s easy to access for reference when necessary.

Available

A view setting that displays items that aren’t blocked, deferred, or on hold.

Backup

A copy of your database automatically generated by OmniFocus and stored for safekeeping should something go amiss with your main database. Backups are automatically created every two hours while OmniFocus is open, and up to 100 are kept before the oldest is discarded.

Blocked

The status of an action in a sequential project that is ordered to come after the first available action.

Clean Up

A clerical process that tidies the views on your database when you switch between them, or when it’s triggered with a menu item or toolbar button. Usually this involves hiding completed items or moving actions into their proper places; you can fine-tune how clean up works in Preferences ▸ Organization.

Complete

The status assigned to an item when you’ve finished it, or finished all the actions that comprise it (in the case of a project or group).

Context

The person, place, thing, state of mind, or other factor most relevant to the completion of a given action or project. These exist outside the project hierarchy and represent another axis from which to view the items you’ve accumulated in your database.

Defer Date

A date and time assigned to an item that you don’t want to (or can’t) consider for completion until later. When the defer date is reached, the item becomes available for further execution.

Due Date

A date and time assigned to an item by which the item must be completed.

Due Soon

A status for items whose due dates are approaching. Items that are due soon are styled in amber for greater visibility. The exact meaning of Due Soon is configurable in OmniFocus ▸ Preferences ▸ Dates & Times.

First Available

A view setting that affects how actions in projects are displayed. A sequential project has one available action and one first available action. A parallel project has one first available action and many available actions. A single action list potentially has many “first available” actions.

Flag

A mark of privileged, eye-catching status bestowed on an item. What this special status denotes is completely up to you, but it’s a great way to keep important things from falling through the cracks. Items that are flagged are styled in orange for greater visibility.

Focus

A feature of OmniFocus Pro that applies to projects and folders (focusing on an action brings the project that contains it into focus). When focused, OmniFocus excludes all items in your database from view other than those in the projects or folders you have selected. Browsing between perspectives retains focus on these items, so you can attack them from multiple angles without distraction.

Focus Bar

A horizontal bar that appears beneath the toolbar to denote that you’re focused (in OmniFocus Pro) or viewing a database other than your current primary one (such as a backup, an archive, or someone else’s database they sent you to take a look at).

Group

A collection items nested hierarchically within another item. Groups created from inbox items are item groups, while groups created within projects are action groups (also sometimes called sub-projects).

Hidden

Items that live in your database but aren’t exposed by the View options of your current perspective are considered hidden. OmniFocus lets you know if you’re about to delete hidden items accidentally; see the Cleaning Up section for details.

Inbox

The built-in perspective designed to hold tasks and to-dos that you’ve entered into OmniFocus as items, prior to processing them into projects, actions, and groups. Once an item becomes a project or an action it’s moved out of the inbox at the next clean up.

Inspector

The pane on the right side of the OmniFocus window that provides editable details about your current selection in the sidebar or the main outline.

Item

Items are representations of tasks and to-dos in an OmniFocus database. Types of items include: Inbox Items, Actions, Projects, and Groups.

Main Outline

The central portion of an OmniFocus window, where a hierarchical view of your database is (usually) displayed. Specific perspectives (such as Contexts and Forecast) have specialized ways of displaying your data that eschew or modify the typical project hierarchy.

OmniFocus Window

A viewport onto an OmniFocus database, including several subsections: the main outline, sidebar, inspector, toolbar, bottom bar, and (occasionally) the focus bar.

On Hold

A status for projects and contexts that aren’t relevant to your plans right now, but may be in the foreseeable future.

Overdue

A status for items whose due dates are past. Items that are overdue are styled in red for greater visibility.

Parallel

A project or group that doesn’t place particular emphasis on the order in which its actions are completed. All actions are considered available, though the topmost action is still considered the first available action for the purposes of view settings.

Pending

An item with its defer date set for some time in the future. Pending is a synonym for deferred; this particular term is only found in OmniFocus Pro as a filtering option for projects in custom perspectives that use the project hierarchy.

Perspective

A view on your OmniFocus database, displayed in an OmniFocus window. OmniFocus 2 comes with six built-in perspectives and two transient reference perspectives (Completed and Changed), and custom perspectives can be added in OmniFocus Pro.

Perspective Tabs

The vertical column of tabs on the leftmost side of an OmniFocus window, displaying a list of persistent perspectives for your browsing pleasure. The six built-in perspectives are included here by default (perspective tabs can be hidden, revealed, and rearranged in OmniFocus Pro).

Perspectives Window

A window in OmniFocus Pro that’s split into two parts: the perspectives list (where perspectives are added, renamed, reordered, and have their tab visibility set) and the perspectives editor (where perspectives are created and customized).

Project

A to-do item that’s larger in scope or permanence than a simple action, potentially containing several actions and groups within it that must be completed before the project can be marked complete.

Remaining

A view setting that displays all items that haven’t been completed or dropped.

Sequential

A project or group whose actions must be completed in a specific order. The first action in the list is the only one available for completion.

Sidebar

The vertical space to the left of the main outline that’s displayed by default along with all perspectives but the Inbox. It contains the project hierarchy in perspectives that use it; otherwise it shows the context list or a special customized view (as with Forecast).

Single Action List

A project whose actions are unrelated to a sequence of any sort, or one that’s maintenance-oriented as opposed to completion-oriented. All actions in a single action list are considered equally available.

Stalled

A project with no remaining actions (all of its actions have been completed). This status is used primarily as a filter for custom perspectives in OmniFocus Pro.

Sub-Project

A term synonymous with action group; a group of actions nested hierarchically within a project.

Status Circle

A graphical display of an item’s status (due soon, overdue, flagged, or repeating), as well as a target to click to mark an item completed (hooray!) or to flag it.

Task

In the context of this manual, a task is something you’d like to accomplish in the real world that you’d capture with OmniFocus (where it would then become an item). To-do is another word with the same meaning.

• About OmniFocus

  Find out some details about your copy of OmniFocus. This is good for checking exactly which version you’re using.

• Check for Updates (Omni Store Only)

  See if there is a new version of OmniFocus available to download. You can also set up automatic checking in the Update preferences.

• Preferences (Command-,)

  Open the OmniFocus preferences window, where you can customize how the application works for you.

• Licenses (Omni Store Only)

  Open the Licenses window, where you can add OmniFocus licenses you’ve bought, or check your existing licenses.

• Free Trial Mode

  If you’re running a trial version of OmniFocus, these commands switch between the Pro and Standard versions of the app so you can compare features.

• Services

  Access system-wide Mac OS X services offered by other applications.

• Hide OmniFocus (Command-H)

  Temporarily hide all of OmniFocus’s windows.

• Hide Others (Option-Command-H)

  Temporarily hide windows of all other applications so you can concentrate on OmniFocus.

• Show All

  Show all windows of all applications.

• Quit OmniFocus (Command-Q)

  Stop using OmniFocus and put it away for now. Your database is automatically saved.

• Upgrade to Pro (Mac App Store Only)

  Open the in-app purchase dialog to unlock the Pro features of OmniFocus 2.

• New Action (Command-N)

  Create a new action in the currently selected project, or create a new item in the inbox.

• New Project (Shift-Command-N)

  Create a new project in Projects or in a perspective that uses project-based hierarchy.

• New Folder

  Create a new folder for organizing projects.

• New Single-Action List

  Create a new list for keeping track of individual actions that don’t fit into projects.

• New Context (Control-Command-N)

  Create a new context in Contexts or in a perspective that doesn’t use project-based hierarchy.

• New Window (Option-Command-N)

  Open a new window just like the frontmost one.

• New Tab (Option-Command-T)

  Open a new tab in the current window, displaying the same content as the current tab.

• Quick Open (Command-O)

  Open the Quick Open dialog to seek out and display a specific perspective, folder, project, or context in your database.

• Close (Command-W)

  Close the frontmost window. Even if you close the last remaining OmniFocus window, you can always just open a new one.

• Import OmniOutliner Document

  Import the content of an OmniOutliner (.oo3) document to your OmniFocus database, with its rows converted to OmniFocus items and columns to metadata fields associated with those items.

• Export

  Export your OmniFocus database in a variety of formats.

• Synchronize with Server Command-S

  If you have set up synchronization in the Sync preferences, coordinate with the server database and make sure that both sides have all of the recent changes you’ve made.

• Replace Server Database

  Replace the version of your database stored on the sync server with the one stored on your Mac. This the tool to use when you encounter a sync conflict and you’re sure that the version of your database you have now is the one you want going forward.

• Show Backups

  If you run into trouble with your OmniFocus database, you can always go back to an older, backed up version. With this command you can browse to the backup file you want, then open and inspect it. If it looks good, click Revert to this backup in the focus bar and your entire database is reverted to how it looked at the time you made the backup.

• Rebuild Database

  Analyze and consolidate all of the entries in your OmniFocus database to make sure they are consistent. This is essentially equivalent to backing up and then restoring your database. If you are having problems with your database, this may help.

• Compact Database

  Take the database changes OmniFocus has logged and condense them. If OmniFocus doesn’t feel as fast as it used to, this may help.

• Move Old Data to Archive

  Store away some of your completed or dropped items in an archive, thus keeping your database slim and making OmniFocus faster.

• Open Archive

  See the old data you’ve archived.

• Page Setup (Shift-Command-P)

  Open the standard OS X Page Setup window, where you can change some settings for printing (or exporting to a PDF file). These settings are saved even if you quit OmniFocus.

• Print (Command-P)

  Open the standard OS X Print window, with a variety of options for printing (or creating a PDF file).

• Undo (Command-Z)

  Reverse the most recent change you made. You can keep stepping backwards like this if there are more changes you want to undo.

• Redo (Shift-Command-Z)

  Reenact the last change you undid. You can keep stepping forward through however many Undo commands you made.

• Cut (Command-X)

  Remove the selected text or items, putting them on the clipboard so you can paste them somewhere.

• Copy (Command-C)

  Put a copy of the selected text or items on the clipboard, so you can paste them somewhere.

• Copy As Link

  Put a link to the selected items on the clipboard; when you paste it, you get an address for each item.

• Copy As TaskPaper

  Copy the selected items with the tag syntax used by Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper to-do list app.

  See Copy as Taskpaper for a list of supported tags and further details on the feature.

• Paste (Command-V)

  Take whatever’s on the clipboard and insert it at the current selection. If the clipboard contains just text (not whole items), and you are editing the text of an item, the text is pasted at the insertion point. Otherwise, the contents of the clipboard are pasted as new items.

• Paste and Match Style (Option-Shift-Command-V)

  Ignore any styles on the text you’re pasting and just use the style already there at the place you’re pasting into. Of course, this only makes a difference in notes, since that’s the only place where you can have special styles anyway.

• Delete

  Remove the selected item(s) or text from your database.

• Select All (Command-A)

  Select everything in the outline, or if you are editing an item’s text, all text in the cell.

• Deselect All (Shift-Command-A)

  Clear the selection completely so that nothing is selected.

• Duplicate (Command-D)

  Make another item just like the selected one, immediately after it.

• Edit Note (Command-’)

  Move from the item text to the note area of an item, or move back from the note area to the item text.

• Convert to Project (Command-!)

• Status

  Choose from this submenu to change the status for the selected project (Active, On Hold, Completed, or Dropped).

• Mark Reviewed (Shift-Command-R)

  Indicate that you’ve reviewed the selected project, thus resetting its next-review date.

• Set/Clear Flag (Shift-Command-L)

  Put flags on the selected items, or remove the flags if the selected items already have them.

• Attach File

  Choose a file to insert in the note area of the selected item.

• Add/Edit Link

  Create or edit a hyperlink to an item within OmniFocus, or beyond.

• Insert Time Stamp

  Automatically type the current date or time, as defined by the Short Date, Long Date, and Time formats set up in System Preferences’ Language & Region pane.

  • Short Date

  • Short Date and Time

  • Time

  • Long Date

  • Long Date and Time

• Find

  This submenu contains the standard Find commands included in many Mac OS X applications: Find (which opens a window where you can use regular expressions and search-and-replace), Find Next, Find Previous, Use Selection for Find (which enters the selected text as the text to search for), and Jump to Selection.

  • Go to Search Field (Option-Command-F)

  • Find (Command-F)

  • Find Next (Command-G)

  • Find Previous (Shift-Command-G)

  • Use Selection for Find (Command-E)

  • Jump to Selection (Command-J)

• Spelling

  This submenu contains the standard Spelling commands for the Mac OS X spell checking system: Spelling (which opens the Spelling window), Check Spelling (which checks spelling in the document once), and Check Spelling While Typing (which turns the automatic spell checking on or off).

  • Show/Hide Spelling and Grammar (Command-:)

  • Check Spelling (Command-;)

  • Check Spelling While Typing

• Speech

  This submenu contains the Start Speaking and Stop Speaking commands, which you can use to make the Mac OS X text-to- speech system say the selected text out loud.

  • Start Speaking

  • Stop Speaking

• Transformations

  This submenu contains commands that apply to selected text in the outline, sidebar, and inspector, to convert it to completely upper case, lowercase, or capitalize each selected word, respectively.

  • Make Upper Case

  • Make Lower Case

  • Capitalize

• Start Dictation (fn fn)

  With dictation enabled in  ▸ System Preferences ▸ Dictation & Speech, select an editable text field and use this command to enter text via the spoken word.

• Special Characters (Control-Command-Space)

  Open the Mac OS X Character Palette, where you can find characters not easily accessible from the keyboard, like ♆ and ☺.

• Clean Up (Command-K)

  Make OmniFocus tidy up after itself, so that all items obey your view settings. Also, take any inbox items you’ve assigned projects or contexts to and move them to where they belong in your library.

• Add Inside (Shift-Command-])

  Create a new item belonging to the selected item; for instance if you have a project selected, this adds an action to the project.

• Add Outside (Shift-Command-[)

  Create a new item at the same level as the selected item’s parent; for instance if you have an action selected at the top level of a project, this creates a new project.

• Move

  These commands rearrange the currently selected item in the outline hierarchy without affecting deselected items. Move Up and Move Down change an item’s location in relation to its siblings. Move Right and Move Left increase or decrease an item’s indentation level. When items move, their descendants move with them.

  • Move Down (Control-Command-Down Arrow)

  • Move Right (Control-Command-Right Arrow)

  • Move Up (Control-Command-Up Arrow)

  • Move Left (Control-Command-Left Arrow)

• Indent (Command-])

  Move the selected item to the right, turning it into a child of the item before it in the outline.

• Outdent (Command-[)

  Move the selected item to the left, making it a sibling of what was its parent. This doesn’t change the location of the item’s former siblings; only the selected item’s position in the hierarchy is affected.

• Group (Option-Command-G)

  In the sidebar, group projects into folders or group contexts into supercontexts. In the main outline, group actions into projects or action groups.

• Ungroup (Option-Command-U)

  Move all of the child items out of the selected item, and get rid of the selected item completely.

• Sort Once

  Using one of the parameters in this submenu, perform a one-time sort of the selected items in the sidebar or the main outline (as long as you’ve selected something that can be reordered).

  • By Name

  • By Status

  • By Date Added

  • By Date Completed

  • By Date Due

  • By Defer Date

• Expand All (Control-Command-9)

  Show all descendants of all currently collapsed items in the sidebar or the main outline.

• Collapse All (Control-Command-0)

  Collapse everything in the sidebar or the main outline to the top level only.

• Expand Item (Command-9)

  Show the children of the selected items.

• Collapse Item (Command-0)

  Hide the children of the selected items.

• Show/Hide All Notes (Control-Command-’)

  Show or hide all note areas with content.

• Show/Hide Note (Option-Command-’)

  Show or hide the note of the selected item.

• Show Full Item Title Always/When Selected

  Choosing When Selected from the submenu causes items with long titles to end with ellipses (...) rather than wrap to a new line when those items are not selected. Otherwise, the full item title will always be shown.

• (PRO) Focus on Selected Projects/Unfocus (Shift-Command-F)

  Focus on the selected projects or folders; that is, make OmniFocus temporarily act like those items are the only things in your whole database. Or, stop focusing and go back to being able to see everything in your database.

• Show in Projects/Contexts (Option-Command-R)

  Switch to either Projects Contexts and select the same items you have selected in the current perspective. This is handy for, say, switching from Contexts to Projects for a moment to examine the project that an action belongs to. Other methods of switching the mode don’t preserve your selection.

• Show/Hide Sidebar (Option-Command-S)

  Show the sidebar complete with perspective tabs, or hide it away.

• Show/Hide Inspector (Option-Command-I)

  Summon up the inspector, or put it away.

• Go to Sidebar (Option-Command-1)

  This and the following two commands are menu items that you likely won’t ever need to click; the idea is just to give you a keyboard shortcut for going back and forth between the sidebar, the main outline, and the inspector without having to touch that dreadful rodent.

• Go to Outline (Option-Command-2)

  Switch to navigate the main outline (tab, return, esc, etc. affect items and fields in the outline).

• Go to Inspector (Option-Command-3)

  Switch to navigate the inspector (tab, return, esc, and so on affect fields in the inspector).

• Show/Hide View Options (Shift-Command-V)

  Open the View options for the current perspective.

• Show/Hide Toolbar

  Show or hide the toolbar. Awesome!

• Customize Toolbar

  Choose which controls appear in the main window’s toolbar.

• Enter/Exit Full Screen (Control-Command-F)

  View OmniFocus at the glorious full dimensions of your screen, or return it to a modest window.

• (PRO) Show Perspectives (Control-Command-P)

  Summon or dismiss the Perspectives window, where you can manage your custom perspectives.

• (PRO) Add Perspective

  Open the Perspectives window with a new perspective created in the list, ready to be named and customized to your heart’s content.

• Inbox (Command-1)

  Open the built-in Inbox perspective in the current OmniFocus window.

• Projects (Command-2)

  Open the built-in Projects perspective in the current OmniFocus window.

• Contexts (Command-3)

  Open the built-in Contexts perspective in the current OmniFocus window.

• Forecast (Command-4)

  Open the built-in Forecast perspective in the current OmniFocus window.

• Flagged (Command-5)

  Open the built-in Flagged perspective in the current OmniFocus window.

• Review (Command-6)

  Open the built-in Flagged perspective in the current OmniFocus window.

• Completed

  Open the built-in Completed perspective in the current OmniFocus window to view your completed actions and projects. Unlike other built-in perspectives, Completed doesn’t stick around in your sidebar when you switch away from it; choose this menu item again to reopen it.

• Changed

  Open the built-in Changed perspective in the current OmniFocus window to view recent changes you’ve made. Unlike other built-in perspectives, Changed doesn’t stick around in your sidebar when you switch away from it; choose this menu item again to reopen it.

Formatting commands are only applicable in note fields.

• Copy Style (Option-Command-C)

  Copy the style of the selected text, so that you can apply it elsewhere with the Paste Style command. This uses a special style clipboard, so you don’t lose the data in the normal clipboard.

• Paste Style (Option-Command-V)

  Apply the style in the style clipboard (obtained using the Copy Style command) to the selected text.

• Clear Style (Control-Command-Delete)

  Remove all styling from the selected text, thus reverting it to the default style. This is useful for getting rid of weird styles in notes that you pasted from other applications.

• Show/Hide Fonts (Command-T)

  Show and hide the Fonts window.

• Show/Hide Colors (Shift-Command-C)

  Show and hide the Colors window.

• Bold (Command-B)

  Embolden the selected text.

• Italic (Command-I)

  Italicize the selected text.

• Underline (Command-U)

  Underline the selected text.

• Bigger (Command-+)

  Increase the size of the selected text.

• Smaller (Command-–)

  Decrease the size of the selected text.

• Minimize Window (Command-M)

  Shrink the frontmost window down into the Dock.

• Zoom

  Switch the frontmost window between the biggest size possible and the last size you set.

• Show/Hide Quick Entry

  Show or hide the Quick Entry window; note that you can customize a keyboard shortcut for this, and use the shortcut from within any application.

• Attachment List

  Open a list of all attachments in your database.

• Bring All to Front

  Get all of the OmniFocus windows up in front of other applications’ windows.

At the bottom of the Window menu is a list of all of your OmniFocus windows; choose one to bring it to the front.

• Search

  Filter commands across all of OmniFocus’s menus to find and select a specific command.

• OmniFocus Help

  View the help documentation available in the in-app help viewer.

• Keyboard Commands

  Open a PDF document containing a list of useful OmniFocus keyboard shortcuts.

• Release Notes

  Check out what’s new since the last version of OmniFocus.

• OmniFocus Product Page

  Visit the OmniFocus page on the Omni Group web site.

• OmniFocus Forums

  Stop by the official OmniFocus forums to view and share insights with other users.

• (PRO) Open Scripts Folder

  Open the designated Finder folder for stashing AppleScript scripts that you want to access from the toolbar.

• Add Tutorial Project

  When you first launch OmniFocus a sample project is added to your database to help you get started. If you want it back, choose this command to recreate it (it’ll be added to your existing projects non-destructively).

• Anonymize Database

  Create a copy of your current database with all identifying text and attachments converted to anonymous entities. This is useful for exchanges with Omni support, or for sharing your database with other OmniFocus users without divulging the details of your private goings-on.

• Contact Omni

  Compose an email to the OmniFocus support team. We’d be happy to give advice, answer questions, or just listen to your feedback.

From the menu bar, choose OmniFocus > Licenses to see the Licenses dialog. From here you can review and edit your OmniFocus licenses, which verify that you’ve actually paid for the software. (Thanks!)

To purchase a license:

• Click Buy Licenses and you will find yourself magically transported to the Omni Store, where you can purchase a license for the Mac versions of our software. (Naturally, this only works if you have an Internet connection.)

To add a new license:

1. From the menu bar, choose OmniFocus > Licenses to see the Licenses dialog.

2. Click Add License.

3. If you have a license key in an email message, copy and paste both the Owner name and the License Key into the appropriate fields. If you can’t copy and paste the information, you’ll have to type it in; make sure you enter everything exactly as it appears in your license message, including the dashes. Also, double-check that the license you’re entering really is a license for OmniFocus 2, and that it is for the correct edition (Pro or Standard); licenses for other Omni products or earlier versions of OmniFocus won’t work.

4. The Type drop-down menu is grayed out by default, which limits the license type to Personal for the current user account on your Mac. OmniFocus has two different types of licenses:

   • Personal: This license is for your personal use, and will only be available on this computer when you are logged in as the user who installed the license. You can install this license on more than one computer, but only for your personal use. You should not use the software on two different computers at the same time with this kind of license. If a personal license is available, the application will always use it.

   • Computer: You can use this license on this computer, and so can any other user of this computer. However, you should not install this license on more computers than it has license seats for.

   If there is more than one user account on your Mac, and you’d like everyone on your Mac to discover the awesomeness that is OmniFocus, you’ll need to jump through a couple of hoops (thanks to Apple’s mandated app sandboxing for OS X 10.7 and above). To set up a Computer license, follow these steps:

   1. Quit OmniFocus 2.
   2. Open a new Finder window.
   3. Switch the Finder’s view settings to Column, by choosing View > as Columns (or use Command-3. This will make it easier for you to traverse the folder hierarchy on your Mac.
   4. Choose Go > Computer.
   5. Choose your Mac’s hard drive (if you haven’t renamed it, it should be named Macintosh HD), and then traverse through the following folders:
      • Library
      • Application Support
   6. In the Application Support folder, create a new folder (choose File > New Folder, or use Shift-Command-N) and name it Omni Group. You will need to enter your admin password to create a new folder at this level.
   7. In the Omni Group folder, create a new folder and name it Software Licenses.
   8. Open OmniFocus 2 again, and then choose OmniFocus > Licenses.
   9. Click Add License.

   When you click Add License, you’ll notice that the Type drop-down menu is no longer grayed out, and the Computer option is available for selection. Now just enter the Owner and License Key information you received from us, click Save, and you should be set.

To remove a license:

1. Select the license you want to remove.
2. Click Delete License.

To move a license from one Mac to another:

1. First, find the license file on the old computer. OmniFocus license files are located in the folder Library/Application Support/Omni Group/Software Licenses, where Library is either at the top level of your system disk (for computer licenses), or in your Home folder (for personal licenses). The file you are looking for has a name such as OmniFocus–123456.omnilicense. Move this file to the new computer.

2. On the new computer, choose OmniFocus > Licenses from the menu bar and then click Add License.

3. On the sheet that appears, click Import License File.

4. Locate and select the license file that you want to import.

5. Click Open. If the license file is compatible—meaning, it is for the same version of OmniFocus—the license will be added to OmniFocus on your other system.

Again, the thing to remember here is that license keys are version-specific; the license key you have for OmniFocus 1 is not compatible with OmniFocus 2 (and vice versa).

The OmniFocus Website

The OmniFocus website is always a good place to find the latest information about OmniFocus, complete with an ever-growing support section.

The Official Forums

The Omni Group maintains online forums for all of our products, and you’re invited! Come share your questions and ideas with other users and Omni staff.

Email Support

If you’re stuck, if you have a good idea for the next version of OmniFocus, or if you just want to let us know how we’re doing, go ahead and send us an email. Choose Help ▸ Contact Omni from the menu bar to conjure up a message addressed to us, or just send us an email with your thoughts. We take support pretty seriously, so you can expect a prompt response actually typed by human hands.

Release Notes

For really meticulously detailed information about what has changed in each minor version of OmniFocus, check out Help ▸ Release Notes from the menu bar.

Troubleshooting

Here are a few tips you can try with OmniFocus’s own built in self-help features:

Finding Misplaced Items

• Try using the Completed and Changed perspectives to track down errant actions.
• Check the Attachment List for images or other files that you may have appended to items tucked deep in your database.
• Open the Archive to look for items that may have been lost to time.
• If all else fails, you can revert to a recent backup for something you know you had access to just a day ago.

Improving Performance

• Sync all the things regularly! This reduces sync wait times and generally improves speed and performance across the board.
• Compact your database to remove unneeded edit histories.
• Archive projects long past. Jettison them now for a nimbler database, and future easy retrieval and reference.
• Delete unneeded attachments to lessen the sync load and disc space footprint of your database.

Resolving Sync Conflicts

• If you’re sure what you have locally is what you want, you can Replace the Server Database to get everything back in sync.
• If you’re unsure (about this, or anything else OmniFocus-related), please contact Omni support! We’re here to help—it’s what we do.