Hey, Wondering if anyone has found a practical way to get Claude Cowork to read from OmniFocus - without using MCP, which isn’t an option for me due to work restrictions. My understanding is that OF is not a readable database.
I want Claude to have visibility of my actual tasks and projects when helping me plan, prioritise, or draft work, rather than me having to describe everything from scratch each time.
Thanks!
Try this. Copies your OmniFocus database to the clipboard. Inside the plugin you’ll find a note export size limit of 200 characters.
Use the following instructions to tell your LLM about the format. I‘ve minimized it to use as few tokens as possible. Your AI will get everything, but won’t be able to write back to OF. However you can ask it to output TaskPaper format. It should be able to read some existing tags from the output of the plugin. If I were you I’d prepare a prompt explaining the idea of each tag and certain things which are important to you. You could ask it to e.g. re-plan everything below a certain folder. Then you could import the result as TaskPaper and then manually replace what you had before.
I am pasting a snapshot of my OmniFocus database in a structured, minified format. Please interpret the data using the following rules:
Add a goal. Paste the plugin output below above text.
CopyForLLM.omnifocusjs (4.1 KB)
@Scg Switch to Projects view, expand all projects and tasks, select all tasks, choose Copy as Taskpaper then paste into Claude. Tell Claude you’ve pasted your OmniFocus database in taskpaper format and it should be able to make sense of it.
Do check the results before you paste though in case you store personal or financial info in your notes that you don’t want to share.
This is all well and good, but I think what we’re all looking/waiting for is an official Omnifocus MCP connector for Claude. If it takes too long, I will be switching to a different task manager even though I’d miss my beloved Omnifocus.
Yep, I’ve used the plug-in shared above (which Claude modified to include some additional metadata), but it’s a patch rather than a fix. The leaps in productivity are so vast that’s it’s going to be impossible to justify using a task manager without ai integration, no matter how much I love the product. @kcase , is there anything in the works?
Adding my voice to this request.
Actually, even better than MCP integration would be a Claude Connector that is plug-and-play.
Any solution that involves copy-and-paste is not going to work.
@kcase - Would love to hear from you directly on this.
Is there any update from @kcase or anyone else at Omni group?
I’m interested to see what Apple unveil at WWDC this year. They could announce their own MCP like orchestrator that can harness all the intents of the installed apps. I’m hoping they can pull off something like this with decent control, constraints and security rather than just a less awful Siri powered by Google.
@kcase and Omni team are normally quite open and transparant on the general direction an app like Omnifocus is developing. Why is there no reaction to this thread at all?
Why can’t they just state their ideas on Claud or MCPs.. At least we then know not to leave Omnifocus.
For me it now feels like software with stalled development and I contemplate for the first time in many years to switch to apps like Todoist
