Just a question: How do I see and delete completed tasks in OmniFocus for Mac? I want to keep almost none of them around at all. Is there a way to view all of them at once (just finished ones) and delete them all in one go, somehow?
Silly question since I’ve been using it for a while, but I never found the answer or even bothered to ask.
File --> Move old items to archive.
Set the date for the cutoff and away you go.
You don’t even have to look at the dropped/completed actions, they just get shifted out of the live database to the archive automatically.
Archiving (I believe) can keep file sizes down and improve sync speed (though recent changes to sync may mean that the latter isn’t true any more)
Thanks! Does that delete them entirely, though? Or it just archives them? For instance, if I have a daily reminder to do a task (say, check email at 10am - which I typically do) and mark it as done for the day, why would I want to archive previous done instances of it instead of just deleting them forever?
I have same requirement and I ended up using this solution Simple scripts to cleanup completed routine actions under certain projects
I’ll check that out. Thank you. :)
I’ve actually never used scripts in Omnifocus and I can’t find any help on how to do that. I did save your script, but I have no idea what to do with it, or where to put it etc…do you have any links where I can learn about that, please?
Hi @NatHarari, You can view all of your completed items in the built-in Completed perspective; to do that, select Menu Bar ▸ Perspectives ▸ Completed. From there, you can manually delete anything you wish by selecting it and pressing the delete key ⌫ on your keyboard. If you really want to, you could select everything using ⌘A and then delete them. Just a word of caution, deleting removes them permanently (i.e. those items are not archived or kept in a ‘trash’ of any kind). It may be possible to retrieve deleted items later from a backup or something, but there’s no guarantee, so delete with caution!
Thank you. Exactly what I needed to know. :) I just think that a few hundred reminders to buy olive oil, coffee, sugar, apples, do laundry, take out the trash etc… I can live without once I’m finished with it. :D
