The Missing Link Between Evernote and OmniFocus: A Workaround

OmniFocus and Evernote are two vital components of my project planning system on MacOS and iOS. I organise all my active commitments into projects in OmniFocus, where I manage my tasks. I make a project note for each of these projects in Evernote, where I store all the text, diagrams, and other reference material related to the project.

The Missing Link

There is a catch with this system though. These apps don’t integrate with each other as well as you might hope. As I work, I want to switch back-and-forth between my tasks in OmniFocus and my documentation in Evernote. This is where the problem arises.

Linking in one direction—from OmniFocus to Evernote—is easy. You right-click on a note in Evernote, press the alt key, and select "Copy Classic Note Link" (there are many webpages out there explaining how to do this). That gives you a nice hyperlink to the note in Evernote, which you can then paste into the notes field of an OmniFocus project or task.

The missing link is back the other way, from Evernote to OmniFocus. In the past, you could select a project in OmniFocus and  “copy as link”. You could then simply paste this link into Evernote. This is still the method currently recommended on the Inside OmniFocus page. But at some point, Evernote made it impossible to paste a link for anything that wasn’t a HTTP address. Now when you paste an OmniFocus link, you just get plain text saying something like “omnifocus:///task/icDN-FlhkDLK”. Not very helpful.

A Workaround

Here is a workaround for making a link from Evernote to OmniFocus:

1. Right click (or control click) on your project in OmniFocus and select “copy as link”:

2. Paste the text into the relevant note in Evernote. It will come out as plain text, and should start with “omnifocus:///task/”

3. When you want to go from Evernote back to Omnifocus, right click on the “omnifocus:///task/” text in Evernote and select Service- “Open URL”:

That will bring OmniFocus to the front and will land you on the correct project inside OmniFocus.

That’s it. It is not quite as fast as a simple click, but better than having to search inside OmniFocus each time. I recommend you always put your OmniFocus link in the same place on your Evernote project notes, so that you know where to find the link quickly. I put my links in the first line of the note.

Project Planning on macOS and iOS

This is my project planning system on macOS and iOS. I use these apps to plan projects within the context of a personal productivity system based around the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach. When planning a project, I use these tools in the following sequence:

1. Task Management System

Project planning starts with a task management system. On macOS and iOS, the best app I’ve found for this purpose is OmniFocus. This is where I create a project and manage tasks for the project, including the project startup tasks.

I’ve spoken more about task management in Episode 191 of The Voluntary Life:

2. Project Documentation

As I start working on a project, I generate notes and graphics which need a home. The second tool in my planning system is my project documentation. I use Evernote on macOS and iOS for project documentation.

I explain my use of Evernote for reference material in Episode 120 of The Voluntary Life Podcast:

3. Mindmap

Once I have a project page in place, I begin to get into the detail of planning the project. The app that I find most helpful in organising my thoughts is a mind map. I do a brain dump and get everything out of my head into a mind map in a fairly unstructured way. As the mind map grows, I order and rearrange ideas on it, categorising different aspects of the project that I need to work on and issues that I need to resolve.

Episode 186 of my podcast has more detail on how I use mind maps in project planning:

4. Process Map

A process map is like a more rigorous and evolved version of the mind map. Whereas a mind map just has everything branching off from a single topic with no further structure, a process chart adds in the sequencing and logic of a project. I use InShort to create my process maps. For more detail about process maps see TVL Episode 205:

5. Gantt Chart

Once I have created a process chart, I can add in task durations and start times and create a Gantt chart within InShort. I find this process a bit tricky in InShort, but I haven’t yet found a good alternative app for it.

A Note On Project Planning Versus Project Management

This workflow is great for a single user doing project planning, but I use different tools for collaborative project management work. That will be a subject for a future post.