"Quick Enter" Projects?

Hi all,

Something has never quite worked for me in OF. I would really love a way to ‘Quick Enter’ projects.

This is how my mind works: I suddenly think of a project I want to do, and I run through all the actions needed. Currently, I open the ‘quick enter’ box, put in the actions one by one and assign each one to the project (creating the project with CMD+Enter shortcut). This feels a little arduous because all I want to do is write the project name in once.

The alternative is to open OF, go to projects, make a new one and put actions into it. My mind is pretty dumb and by the time I’ve entered the “Project” area of OF I’ve already forgotten the project I was going to add (usually because I’ve just seen all the projects already in there).

Does anyone have a way of quick entering full projects that work for them?

Thanks! Tim

I think my method for doing this very quickly would be to start in the Inbox (or QE) with an action that represents my project, adding children (I use the ⇧⌘] shortcut to create children quickly) for each action that I know about already. I’d be left with an action group, which I’d then convert to a project using “outdent” (⌘[). My original action becomes the project, and all its children get assigned the newly converted project.

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Awesome, thanks for this. Didn’t know about that ‘make child’ shortcut, that’ll be handy. When I try to outdent to make a group a project I just get an error sound, though. Is there a trick to that?

Oops! Looks like you can’t convert to a project using outdent in Quick Entry. To make matters worse, you can’t do it in the Inbox perspective either.

The place you can do it is in “Inbox in Projects”. We’ve got a feature request open for allowing it everywhere and I’ve just bumped it up based on my discovery. Sorry about that!

The “Convert to Project” menu item has the keyboard shortcut ⇧⌘1 (or ⌘! if you think of it that way) and works in the Inbox perspective, but also not in QE. If you use QE to dash off your idea using the “create child” method, you can always come back to it later in the Inbox and convert that way.

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Thanks for this Dave. As someone who forgets most keyboard shortcuts in second, this would be an amazing shortcut to have on an eventual touch bar implementation. This is great in the meantime though, thank you!

Dave,

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘Inbox in projects’. I only know of one Inbox in OF

This is a relatively new option in OmniFocus 2 for Mac. At the bottom of OmniFocus Preferences > Organization, there’s a checkbox for “In the Projects perspective: Show Inbox”.

Thanks. So “Inbox in projects” is a way to be able to define projects from the inbox in a more streamlined way that the one allowed in the Inbox perspective. ¿right? I discarded the option since it didn’t make sense to me to see in the projects view something not yet assigned to any of them.

This is what the user manual says:

“This option is available for convenience of interaction between your Inbox and Projects perspectives, and does not otherwise change the behavior of the Inbox”

Actually, it let’s you bypass the preference I have set that you need a context before cleaning up from the inbox. ¿Any reason we have this in the project view and not in the context view?
(not that I need it, just learning)

In OmniFocus 1, Inbox appeared alongside Projects in a view called Library. In OmniFocus 2, we separated the two and folks who liked to be able to see their Project hierarchy at the same time as the contents of their inbox were disappointed. It took us a while, but we added Inbox in Projects in order to help those. customers.

Case closed!, Thanks again. i love having a dedicated inbox perspective to throw everything in, with no additional info. Now we have the best of both worlds