Back when I was working as a school psychologist, one of my favorite automations for OmniFocus included AppleScript. I created a script that would generate a project in OmniFocus with all of the steps necessary to complete a special education eligibility evaluation, and create a folder for the student’s evaluation materials in Finder.
I don’t evaluate students anymore, but I do observe teachers, school psychologists, social workers, LDT/Cs, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and physical therapists. We use the Danielson Framework, with additional requirements and structure provided by Achieve NJ.
Without getting into all of the steps, an observation fits the definition of a project under GTD: you have to schedule the observation, schedule a post-conference, score the observation, and more. I detailed how I use OmniOutliner to track this part of my work; as a useful digression, it isn’t that I don’t find OmniFocus useful for tracking observations, but OmniOutliner is a valuable planning tool that lets me review my progress from a higher level than OmniFocus does. OmniFocus, however, provides the granularity I need to manage each observation once I get started.
OmniFocus doesn’t currently support project templates, but it does support TaskPaper import. You can create a TaskPaper file and import it into OmniFocus; for this, I like to use Drafts and the TaskPaper to OmniFocus action.
In order to easily repeat the staff member’s name into through project title and corresponding tasks, I dropped TextExpander into the mix.1
Textexpander Template Snippet
TextExpander is famous for firing snippets by monitoring your keyboard input for abbreviations. This is a core feature of the application, but on the Mac, you can also expand snippets by invoking TextExpander’s Inline Search. Inline Search manifests a Spotlight-like search bar, where you can type to narrow down available snippets to find the one you need.
It’s a roundabout process, but stepwise, I:
- Open Drafts
- Fire the TextExpander Snippet
- Export the TaskPaper note to OmniFocus
Drafts, Taskpaper, and OmniFocus
I could shave a step off what happens in OmniFocus, but I let the project go into the inbox, where I add anything else I forgot and convert it into a project.
And minus the inline search feature in TextExpander, this all works exactly the same on iPad.
1Via Never Miss A Task, With Project Templates (Omnifocus Mini-Series), I found the inimitable Rosemary Orchard’s TaskPaper to OmniFocus Actions collection. Her collection is a bit much for my needs, but you can automate the hell out of TaskPaper templates in Drafts and send them just about anywhere, and as fully featured as you like, in OmniFocus. One of the most interesting features is the ability to create variables that the Draft action will prompt you to fill, neatly solving the same problem that TextExpander does for me. If you aren’t a TextExpander user, or prefer to keep things intimate between Drafts and OmniFcous, check out Rose’s actions.