Using Due App for OmniFocus Reminders

OmniFocus’ reminders are still pretty difficult to work with, in my humble opinion, so I’ve been trying to figure out a faster way to send a few OF tasks to the Due app in iOS.

I’ve been able to figure out a way to use the share sheet from inside OF to send the task with its deep link included, but I can’t seem to figure out how to format it pretty so that I get only the OF task title and its deep link into Due.

I’d also like to know your guys’ opinion on this. Am I overdoing it having a few super-duper important tasks in two places? Is there a better way to do it?

I occasionally have ultra important tasks that need to get done, and if I’m lazy one morning and forget to do my morning routine or something, it’d be nice to have that safety net on a few high priority tasks.

Hopefully that makes sense. I’d love to know your guys’ thoughts/recommendations!

PS - if the solution also works on macOS, that’d be even better! :slight_smile:

What is it Due is doing for you in this scenario that Omnifocus is not? Is it just down to you having some sort of issue with setting Omnifocus reminders? If so, I would suggest that tackling that issue is the way to go. Then you have no data duplication, a simpler cross-platform solution to your issue, and improved understanding.

Assuming this is the case, perhaps you could describe something about how you are entering some example task, and where you encounter the issue?

Great question. The biggest annoyance with OF’s reminders is you can’t add reminders to tasks on devices where you’ve turned notifications off. I only want to receive notifications on my iPhone, but that then means I can only add reminders to tasks with my iPhone – not my iPad or macOS devices since I’ve disabled reminders on those. Also, the Due app does a fantastic job at nagging. For the way my brain works, nagging reminders are pretty great. OF for iOS has snooze-able reminders, but you have to remember to manually snooze them every time they pop up.

I’m honestly not too concerned about task duplication, but I might have to learn that lesson the hard way. I feel like having everything in OF helps me keep a bird’s eye view, but adding a select few tasks with their deep links to Due helps me assure I get those super important tasks done on time.

I think I just need to fiddle around with the list options in Shortcuts to extract the task’s deep link from the body of text that copies to the clipboard when sharing an OF task via the share sheet. Once I can isolate just that link, I should be able to make a variable out of it, and add it it Due.

Thanks for your advice!

I’ve not tested this, but the following might work.

If you export via the share sheet to reminders, you get the details and the link for the OF task.

Due can be set to auto-import from a reminders list. It says it will only import reminders with a due date, so that’s the point where it will be interesting to see if Due-Reminders-OF have a distinction between due date and notification time. It could be a good match, or it could be a blocking difference in terminology.

But I think that it would be worth checking if that brings through the info you want as it would be a lightweight solution if it did.

Yeah I tried that as well, but it didn’t seem to be as smooth as I would’ve liked.

I figured out getting the OF deep link from the list of data passed through to Shortcuts from OF’s share sheet, but now I’m trying to figure out how to truncate the text in order to get the OF task’s name into Due as well.

I’m reading that RegEx is the way to go for that, but I don’t know RegEx all that well yet, so I’ll have to do some reading. :slight_smile:

I figured it out, finally. I had to use Toolbox Pro, but here it is if anyone’s interested! https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/8aeeb1ca1f0b4f1fb024f790897c5d3a

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As an aside, I think you can drop your set variable actions and just use magic variables to reference the values in the Due action. similarly you should only need to split the input once and reference that via a magic variable when you need it a second time. But they are just improvements, the key thing is that you figured out how to get it working.

Might be worth you listening to the Regular Expressions episode as a primer.

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Thanks for your help!

Thank you so much for this! I’ve been wrestling with trying to cobble together a solution on this today before I decided to search out anyone here who might have tried it already. I have the same hang-up with OF notifications and thought Due was the perfect notification “platform” for me. But I couldn’t figure out a good way to get from OF to Due. This is some nice work!

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Thanks @joshautomator

I just downloaded your shortcut and will hopefully integrate it into my workflow.

Here’s my current philosophy on Due and OF. OF is fantastic for managing big complicated projects but (at least for me) OF isn’t so great at being a currently working on task list because it’s power also adds complexity and distraction. In GTD terms, OF is great for PLANNING but not so great for DOing.

Due on the other hand is great for DOing because it’s simple, has a quick gesture based UI, has quick access to deferring by 10 min or a 1 hr etc., and most importantly, it NAGS me. I love the auto snooze feature because it keeps me on task.

So I’d like to use both OF and Due. OF for Planning. Due for Doing.

And there’s the problem. Now the tasks are in two different places. The system becomes more complicated and have to send things back and forth and update each other. And if you’re system becomes more complicated, you’re going to eventually abandon it or forget it or get frustrated with it.

So I’ll keep playing around with your shortcut, but I’d like to see if I can add the ability to automatically sync it in the background. I have a tag called NOW in OF for tasks that I’m working on right now and I would love it if I could build a shortcut that detects changes in the NOW tag and adds the new ones to Due. (Maybe simply an automation in Shortcuts that runs at the same time every day, checking for changes and then using your shortcut for each new task that needs to be sent to Due.)

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