How do you handle working closely with someone who isn't in OmniFocus?

OmniFocus
1

Long-time OF user, and it’s completely embedded in how I work — everything goes through it, work and personal. The system works.

Except: I run a company with a co-founder. He needs to see what I’m on with, hand me things, know when stuff he’s waiting on is done. And OmniFocus is (gloriously, deliberately) single-player.

Right now the honest answer is I duplicate things into wherever the conversation is happening and reconcile by hand, which is exactly as tedious and error-prone as it sounds. And I’ve had roles before where the team ran Trello/Jira/whatever and I quietly mirrored the lot into OF and back.

Curious how others handle this. Do you double-enter? Force the other person into screenshots and status calls? Keep a separate shared tool and treat OF as private? Something cleverer? Genuinely interested in the ugly workarounds — mine can’t be the only one.

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I’ve had a similar challenge on and off for many years. When working as part of a team, you need a central view of where everyone’s up to.

My questions are:

  1. How often does your partner need an update.
  2. How up to date does a shared list need to be?
  3. How many projects are you talking about needing to share?
  4. Is it as simple as “This is completed, over to you” or “I’m about 40% way through completing this”?

For example, could you have 15 minute standups two or three times a week with your partner and verbally share progress and updates?

Could you have a shortcut which exports a list of your work projects or completed actions to share with them?

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Great questions — answering them made me realise I hadn’t actually pinned this down.

1 & 2: It’s less about update frequency and more that the conversation isn’t a register. We talk most days anyway — but a verbal update evaporates, and then one of us is asking “did that thing happen?” three days later. So “up to date” matters less than “always checkable without asking me.”

3: Right now about ten live projects in the shared bucket, but churning — things park and unpark constantly.

4: Mostly binary, honestly — “done, over to you” and “handed to you, waiting” covers 90% of it. The 40%-progress stuff comes up naturally when we talk; it’s the handoffs and completions that get lost.

We do the standups already, which is partly why I posted — the standup is where the duplication happens: things said out loud then re-typed into wherever. The export-shortcut idea is interesting though. You said you’ve had this on and off for years — did you ever build that export, and did it stick? That’s the bit I’m most curious about: what people actually built versus what quietly got abandoned.

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I like the question. I’ve essentially landed on treating OF as my personal brain extension. I mostly only show its statuses to other people through conversation. It doesn’t bother me because OF is a net benefit to me whether I’m working solo or with them, and I feel like I lose the benefits of my idiosyncratic usage if other people start to observe it.

When we’re using a shared tool (Basecamp or whatever) then I usually don’t double-post those into OF unless I need a little reminder/flag to prioritize one of them the next day. I’m thankful not to have to work with any task tools I hate here. :)

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Really interesting — and honestly a bit tempting. Keeping OF completely private and just talking to people does sound simpler.

I think the difference for me is it’s a co-founder, so stuff is passing between us every day. We do talk constantly — but things get agreed out loud and then just… evaporate, because neither of us wrote it down anywhere that matters. Then three days later it’s “did you do that thing?” “what thing?”

Your point about losing the benefits if people observe your setup really lands though. My OF is full of weird personal conventions that only make sense to me. If I ever sort this properly, nobody’s getting a window into the actual system — it’d have to be some curated slice of it at most.

Does the evaporating-agreements thing ever bite you, or do your collaborations just not have that daily back-and-forth?

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I’m sorry Andy, there’s no easy way to say it, but this sounds like failure of ownership.

In this situation, you’re two cofounders with equal billing, but reframe it as someone who reports into you, who you meet once a week for an update and who repeatedly fails to deliver on agreed actions because they “forgot”. I wouldn’t accept that as a manager.

There’s no tech product here that will solve your problem. it’s that your “Meeting” doesn’t have a structure.

Either individually (for your own), one person having the responsibility to gather, or you take it in turns to be responsible for gathering the actions, recording them and then you both have to hold each other accountable.

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My weekly review was where I took stock every week and updated whatever central systems there were.

For my meeting with my Manager, I added the Context named after my manager into actions on the projects I needed to update them on and would pull up their Context (as it used to be) and work my way through the projects updating, asking them for decisions and the like.

At one point, meeting notes were taken (by me) in Evernote and actions from meetings manually transferred into OF. You could use something like Bear, Agenda, Obsidian now and probably automatically transfer them.

I currently make notes on a Remarkable tablet and manually transfer actions into OF.

8

Thinking about this overnight, I’ve seen AI Notetaking apps which will try to identify actions and owners. I’ve seen them in larger enterprise products, but I wonder if something like Granola would meet your needs.

Something like this may stop actions being lost into the ether and with MCP and API options, you may be able to get them pulled into Omnifocus or another tool.

9

Funnily enough I’ve ended up automating the exact loop you describe — I doodle on a day-notes PDF my assistant generates onto the reMarkable each morning (one page per agenda item), and in the evening it reads the handwriting back, works out what’s an action, and files it into OmniFocus with owners tagged. Took an afternoon to build with AI driving the reMarkable and OmniFocus via MCP. Granola’s a good shout for the meeting-audio side — same pattern, different capture surface; the trick either way seems to be that actions only survive if something reads the capture the same day.

The other piece I’ve added since: a bidirectional sync between OmniFocus and a GitHub Projects board, for working with my co-founder. He lives in GitHub, I live in OmniFocus — the sync mirrors my shared projects to issues and milestones, carries owners both ways (a tag in OF becomes the assignee on the board and vice versa), closes things back into OF when he’s done, and I get a kanban view for free. The unlock in both cases was the same: OmniFocus finally being reachable by AI over MCP means it can be the private cockpit while other tools act as shared surfaces.

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10

I have this same issue. Deep OF4 / GTD user for approaching a decade. Love its functionality. Happy to pay my subscription every year.

Also have some items that I have to collaborate with colleagues, and separately, items where I have to collaborate with family members, and separately, items where I have to collaborate with professionals (e.g. my accountant).

For work, we use Asana. It’s really good, but lacks things I value in my workflow e.g. defer dates.

For family, I pay an INSANE amount for Asana (they don’t offer a family plan)

Most of my professionals use one of iCloud shares, Google Workplace, Dropbox, Box. YES, I have to use all 4.

it’s all annoying and complex and inelegant.

Last month I gave up and have been vibe-coding a new platform to rule them all.

I’m building an E2E encrypted OF4-like app that supports the multi-user and collaboration features I use at work. I have a V1 now I’m using with my family. I’m also including features OF4 lacks e.g tracking individual activities on a task (available on most other platforms). It allows me to keep all my prior “OF” things private, and I can granularly share individual Folders, Projects, and Tasks. This is just for my use and collaboration, I don’t intend to commercialize it. But it wasn’t hard to build. The data model is simple and ~75% of the vibe coding time has been on UI tweaks.

I’m maybe in an unique situation because I have a programming background, I like to build apps, and my profession requires me to stay up to date on AI and vibe coding capabilities, so this also serves as a use case for my own education. So I can justify the time, and don’t expect it to be a maintenance burden.

Still, I wish I didn’t have to go this route, I’d rather buy. Since OF has committed to single-user-only it puts us in a bad spot. Either we prioritize OF4/GTD and accept parallel / duplicate systems and multiple workflows, or we prioritize collaboration and go Asana, Trello, etc. Two bad choices but here we are.