Like I suspect a lot of people do, I treat my OmniFocus Inbox as a firehose. I dump things in throughout the day and sort them out later. Two chores always ended up eating my time: filing all those Inbox items into the right projects, and then fleshing out the terse ones (“read this,” “look into X”) once they landed in a project. So I built a small toolkit to help with both, using the Claude API to do the thinking. Sharing it in case anyone else works the same way.
It’s a pair of command-line tools (macOS + OmniFocus 3/4):
1. Inbox triage. It reads every open Inbox item and classifies each one against your active projects, then moves the confident matches into place. The nice part: it reads each project’s OmniFocus note as a description of what belongs there, and that description outweighs the project name — so a one-line note like “Home — repairs, appliances, utilities, insurance” makes the matching much sharper. It can also read PDF/image attachments and forwarded-email notes. Low-confidence or unmatched items are left in the Inbox for you to file by hand.
2. Task reviewer. Point it at one or more projects and it enriches the not-yet-reviewed tasks in place: it follows any link the task references and reads its attachments, then gives the task a clearer title and appends a short summary to the note. It tags each one reviewed so re-runs skip it. It’s non-destructive so the original note, URL, and attachments are all preserved.
A couple of things I care about that might matter to you too:
-
Dry-run by default. Both tools just report what they’d do and change nothing until you add
--apply. So you can watch it work before it touches anything. -
Everything runs locally. It reads OmniFocus on your Mac via
osascript/JXA — no sync accounts, no data going anywhere except the Claude API call for the classification/summary step.
There’s also an optional MCP server so you can have Claude Desktop run these on a schedule for you, and a small tweak to the community “Kanban Board” plug-in to show a Reviewed lane — but those are extras; the two CLI tools are the core.
Fair warning — this won’t be for everyone. You need to be comfortable with the terminal, and it requires an Anthropic API key (so there’s a small per-run cost for the model calls). It’s very much built to scratch my own itch. But if you’re the kind of person who over-stuffs their Inbox and wishes filing and cleanup were less manual, you might get some mileage out of it.
Repo (MIT, setup instructions in the README): https://github.com/dstampfli/omnifocus-toolkit
Best,
Dave
