There are a few ways to set up a checklist functionality. I’ll give two examples.
Example One: Weekly Review
The first is how you might conduct a weekly review. You can have a weekly task, with a defer and due date, to trigger review project such as this:
The task repeats every week by assigned date. It has a tag of “Current” which causes it to appear in my Current perspective:
The resulting task rests in my Current list:
Instead of linking to a dedicated perspective as you see in mine, you could link to a Weekly Review project using the Copy as Link function. To do so:
- Secondary click the project.
- Select Copy as Link:
- Paste the link into the note field of the triggering task.
The project, itself, also repeats weekly and is set to auto-complete when its last task is done:
However, I have no due date assigned to it. The only thing that has the due date assigned is the triggering task described early that appears in the Today view. This way, the only thing that would appear in the Forecast’s due areas is that single task.
Example Two: Morning Checklist
As another example, I will use a repeating task to trigger a daily office checklist.
This method uses a program external to OmniFocus, OmniOutliner. You can use other checklist type programs, but OmniOutliner has suited me just fine.
To set it up:
- Create an OmniOutliner list of all of the tasks for the morning .
- Save it as a template. (Menu > File > Save as Template).
- Create a task set to repeat daily such as “Go through morning routine”
- Open its note field (Command-‘)
If you want to have OmniFocus directly connect an alias to the file:
- While holding Control, drag the OmniOutliner template file into the note field.
Alternatively, you can use a program such as Hook to link to the file. I prefer using Hook as the links tend to be more reliable for me.
This second example does, more or less, tie the work to my laptop where the template resides, but that is fine as the laptop is the only place I do the office checklist. For this case, I prefer to have all of the tasks outside of OmniFocus.
