Sharing Tasks with Co-Workers or Teams

I’ve been using OmniFocus since its very first release and incredibly frustrated with the continued lack of any collaboration feature.

I NEED to collaborate with my wife on various personal and business related issues, and with my teammates on business issues.

I tried using ToDoist for the tasks that needed collaboration while keeping my main list in OmniFocus, but this is a complicated solution as running two different systems means twice as much to keep track of.

I can only hope that after OF Mac 3 is released that OmniGroup will address this glaring omission, but I am not hopeful. There was lip service paid to collaboration in the 2018 Road Map published earlier this year:

For OmniFocus 3, we’re adding support for linking tasks between unrelated databases. The idea is that I can send you a task (with its notes and attachments and due date) and propose that our tasks be linked, and you can choose whether to accept the link or not. While our tasks are linked, we can each see updates to the status of that specific task. But in each of our databases, that task can live wherever we want: so I can turn my task into its own project with a number of subtasks, while you might have that task as one step in a sequential project.

…but this feature is absent from the current iOS release (unless I’m missing something).

PLEASE OMNIGROUP, GIVE US SOME KIND OF COLLABORATIVE ABILITY IN OMNIFOCUS!!

I know software development at this level is not easy, but how hard can it be to implement something like what ToDoist offers, where projects can be shared, and any given task can be assigned to another user.

Curious how others in my shoes have dealt with this problem?
Grateful for suggestions/solutions.

Task sharing didn’t make the cut for v3.0 for Mac or iOS. It’s on the roadmap so we’ll see it down the line. Remember that v3.0 is not the final product. We’ll be getting v3.1, v3.2, etc. Each update will add something new.

I’ve heard of folks using Anylist as a way to share shopping lists. I’ve been in an office environment that uses Asana for shared tasks and projects.

I’m comfortable with keeping my work projects in Asana for collaborative work.

Another obstacle to overcome is that both parties must have their own copy of OmniFocus and willing to use it.

I’ve seen a contractor come to our office and develop a FileMaker database for us to use (as per directions of the boss). I was comfortable with FileMaker but my co-workers preferred to work in Excel for their data tables. In the end, FileMaker was a tool that was eventually dropped because my co-workers wanted Excel.

Everyone will have their own preferred method for task management. Some are happy with the Bullet Journal. Others are fans of other task managers such as 2Do, OmniFocus, Things, Todoist, or whatever app is out there.

All I care about is that I e-mailed the task to someone. It’s up to that other person to figure out what to do with it. I can’t force my co-workers to use OmniFocus just because I use it. If they don’t have OmniFocus, I can’t share it.

Personally, I’d like to see OF3 fo the Web grow to a point where my co-workers can log in to a shared OF3 project and see all the tasks that are assigned to each individual. But I already see that with Asana.

Send your vote to omnifocus@omnigroup.com to vote for task sharing. The more votes that get sent in, the better the chances that this feature request will move up faster in the development cycle. No guarantees but it’s a start.

Nothing is as simple as it seems…

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wildonng - Thanks for your input. Email sent to omnifocus@omnigroup.com !

I just entered about 6 shared tasks into Reminders and was wanting to yell at it almost the whole time (no easy way to duplicate a task and edit it; clicking “on a particular day” causes the info window to close and suddenly you’re typing somewhere else and just overwrote the title of that task, etc). So, came here to check if there’s any way we could use OF for this.

I’m piping up with the request because our use case is maybe a bit different from most of yours. In particular, we’re sharing household chores where we normally do particular tasks, but on occasion, I might do one my son normally does and vice versa. The ones I was adding today are meds to give one of my dogs. They would have been so much easier to add to Omnifocus, but since I’ll be giving some of the meds and my son some of the others, that just won’t work. It’s also nice that when I was out of town and my son had to do all the tasks, he had them right there.

So, what I want to be able to do is create a task like:

  • Give Misty her steroids – defer 10 hours on completion; due in 14 hours.

That works out to twice a day. My son will often give her a dose in the morning, and I’m more likely to give her the evening dose. So, it’d be ideal if the task was completed and repeated for both of us when either of us checked it off.

So, that’s probably a dream, but I thought I’d mention it.

Thanks for your consideration!

Good morning everyone,

So as I way to share assignments I came about Dakboard, I plan to install one in the office and another where my chemistry techs spend the most time. It will list a calandra with asígnmets and due dates.

But I also wanted to post “todos” that some migth have, I found todoist ca be linked and these can be displayed.

As many here I don’t want separated tools but necessity can force you.

Anyone out here have a workflow to sync todoist with OF3???

Thank you. Also I set a request to Omnigroup to add their cloud to the dakboard this would be the best scenario. Even if Employees can’t login or don’t want todoist in there phones, if they can see their assignments posted at least they can do them and send me an email once completed

Thank you

What is current status? (Aug 2021)

Very depressing to read this thread about OF “sharing capabilities”. Messages from 2015 hoping that this feature would come soon and now it’s late 2021, OF4 is just around the corner, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed (except that many that wrote the messages probably gave up using OF long time ago). Omni keeps updating the UI but not the core of the app, making OF a LEGACY piece of software when compared to Todoist, TickTick, etc. Why? What’s the real issue to put this feature to work?

It does not make OF a legacy app it makes it a task manager for individuals.

Omni group said limited collaboration was coming, and yes it has not arrived but some of us do not need or want collaboration so it’s fine.

Different apps serve different needs and that’s no bad thing surely?

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