Claude cowork and Omnifocus integration

OmniFocus
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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!

1 Like
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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:

  1. Structure & Hierarchy
  • Indentation represents depth: Items indented with tabs are children of the item above them.
  • Colons (:) denote Containers: Lines ending in a colon (e.g., Work:, Project X:) are Folders or Projects. They contain the tasks below them.
  • Dashes (-) denote Tasks: Lines starting with a dash are actionable tasks.
  • Blockquotes (>) denote Notes: Lines starting with are context/notes for the task immediately above.
  1. Metadata
  • @Tags: Words starting with @ (e.g., @Deep_Work) are context tags.
  • Dates: @due(YYYY-MM-DD) is the deadline. @defer(YYYY-MM-DD) is the start date.
  • Status: If an item is in this list, assume it is active (not completed or dropped).
  1. Context
  • Current Date: Today is Sunday, March 8, 2026.
  • Goal:

Add a goal. Paste the plugin output below above text.

CopyForLLM.omnifocusjs (4.1 KB)

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@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.

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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.

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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?

2 Likes
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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.