Omnifocus 2 and templates

OmniFocus OmniFocus for Mac
#1

Like many other people, I often have projects where I have to go through a predefined sets of tasks that are always the same.

To handle this, I have created a folder called “Lists” in Omnifocus where I put all my project templates such as:

  • Project start
  • Project end
  • Project type A
  • Project type B
  • …

Those projects are set to “On hold” so the templates don’t appear in my projects list. Whenever I have a new client’s project, I change the perspective to see all “On hold” projects. Then I create a new project in a folder called “Client’s project” and then duplicate the needed templates for that particular project and move the copies into the client’s project as sub-projects.

I also do the same for my personal projects such as cooking. I duplicate a recipe, change the status flag to “Active” and automatically have the ingredients in my “Errands” context for the next time I go to the supply store.

This has worked pretty well for me since I started using Omnifocus back in 2009. I am pretty sure many people are using Omnifocus the same way. It would be nice to have it built-in Omnifocus when creating a new project. For example “Create a new project from templates” and then have a list of templates.

Also there is a small bug with Omnifocus 2. I can’t remove the un-hold status flag on sub-projects. The workaround is pretty simple is to move the sub-projects outside the project. Change the status flag to “Active” and move them back into the client’s project. It works but it is a bit annoying.

#2

Even though there is no built-in functionality to make a project from a template, there are two very smart guys who came with AppleScript based solutions:

  1. @curt Clifton and his Populate Template Placeholders — I’ve used it for ages and it is still brilliant
  2. Chris Sauvé built upon @curt’s script, enhancing and extending its functionality to release his Templates script.

Worth taking a look, both very elegant solutions ;-)
My suggestion: take a look at Curt’s 1st.

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#3

I came looking for a fix for Curt’s script no longer marking new projects as active… and found this reference to Chris Sauvé’s script (now at https://github.com/lemonmade/templates).

Chris’ script is very flexible, (and is much smarter about how it works with dates) but I would give people a couple of warnings:

The flexibility leads to slowness for templates with large numbers of tasks (my packing-for-a-trip template has 110 items, Chris’ script takes almost 3 minutes to populate it).

There is a serious bug where populating a template first deletes the template being populated, and then deletes the entire Templates folder. I populated a few templates a few times, and the catastrophic deletion of all Templates happened every time.

I don’t know if the serious bug is due to something odd about my OMF file, or if there have been changes to the OMF applescripting dictionary, but be careful.