Get Started With OmniFocus 3

Few task management apps are as powerful as OmniFocus—or as intimidating for beginners. But fear not! Just follow these six tips to turbocharge your way through the app.

Just getting started with OmniFocus? Focus on Inbox and don’t worry about those other tabs for now. It has pretty much everything you need. Here’s where you’ll add items, tag them, assign a due date, and eventually mark them complete (hooray!).

You can easily rearrange tasks with the same tag by dragging and dropping. Put that power to good use. If you’re getting ready to leave the office, for instance, you might call up all the tasks you’ve tagged “errands” and reorder them according to the stops you’ll be making.

You can add tags for categories like Priority, Energy Level, Location, and any other context that makes sense to your workflow. Using them will let you focus on tasks relevant to where you are and the resources you have at hand. Looking for high-priority tasks you can accomplish on the phone when you’re feeling low-energy? Proper tagging will help you zero in.

If you’re using OmniFocus on more than one device, be sure to set up Omni’s Sync Server. It’s free to use and will keep your Mac in sync with your iPhone and iPad.

Another reason to create that Sync Server account: It allows you to send items to your OmniFocus inbox by emailing a unique address associated with your account.

You probably figured out that the arrow keys are an efficient way to navigate OmniFocus’ outline. But did you know you can edit a selected item by simply pressing Tab? When you're done, press Return to confirm or Escape to cancel. Or to confirm your edit and create a new item in one fell swoop, press Return twice.