GTD Brain Dump to OmniFocus

Actions - Help & Questions
,
#1

Hello all,

I recently found Markdown Tasks to OmniFocus and it is going to be a big help for meeting notes in the future.

It got me thinking about my GTD Weekly Review and perhaps creating an Action in Drafts to format a trigger list with markdown headers to signify the various areas of my life/responsibility. From there I can dictate action items onto their own lines under each header and be more satisfied that I have done a thorough review.

Since I will be dictating the action items and navigating to a new line via voice, I don’t think the auto-formatting will work like it does when I am typing meeting notes.

Example

# Weekly Review Brain Dump on [[date]]

## Family
Take down Christmas tree

## Work


### Admin
Order paper

### Teaching
Make Test
Grade Test

## Personal Projects

### Blog Posts

### YouTube Videos

I am struggling with the best way to move the action items (and not the headers) to OmniFocus.

It seems like the line in the Markdown Tasks to OmniFocus action, that I need to modify is this one:

if (line.startsWith('- [ ] ')) {

If I can modify that to search for any letter instead of "- [ ] " I think I am in business. But I don’t know how to do that.

If that can’t be done is there a better way to send lines that do not start with a # to OmniFocus?

If there is not a better way, how do I prepend "-[ ] " to all lines that do not start with # so I can run the Markdown Tasks to OmniFocus?

2 Likes
#2

You might be better off with one of the following two approaches:

  1. Learning Taskpaper format - as it allows for projects and isn’t difficult.
  2. Writing or obtaining some code to transform the above to Taskpaper format.

The reason I say this is because Omnifocus does rather well with Taskpaper format and Drafts has built in support for it.

#3

Thanks for the input! I am a big fan of Taskpaper, but I had not thought about using it here.

To clarify, I do not plan on using this draft for organizing a project, just to help me collect individual action items which I will process in my OmniFocus Inbox. I very much like doing this via dictation so I will have to see if having this as a Taskpaper Draft helps get the items over to OmniFocus while still allowing dictation to drive the creation.

1 Like
#4

Not tested, but if I understand correctly, I think the below changes would do what you want:

// comment out
//if (line.startsWith('- [ ]')) {
//	taskpaper += line.replace('[ ]', '') + "\n";
//}
// replace with
if (line.length > 0 && !line.startsWith('#')) {
	taskpaper += "- " + line + "\n";
}

That would build the list ignoring empty lines and lines that are headers (start with “#”), and it adds the "- " for you to make the item a TaskPaper style task.

2 Likes
#5

You have some ready made projects right there, BTW. Maybe not your usual ones. And maybe you can adapt what @agiletortoise posted to create project names disjoint from your usual ones.

1 Like
#6

It works exactly as I had hoped, thank you very much!