Hi there!
I’m looking for a task manager that lets me attach files like pdf, word, excel, keynote, etc.
I’m currently using reminders but it can only hold photos and photos of documents.
Omnifocus can do so…
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Remember The Milk (Pro) can do that:
(but only via Dropbox or Google Drive, so I don’t use this feature)
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Omnifocus can do this also
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If you wish to carry on using Reminders you could look at trying the Hook app. This can make links to any file on your Mac. Click on the file, invoke Hook and then paste the link into your Reminders task. The links do not work on iOS or iPadOS but if you only want to access the files on a Mac then you should be OK.
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Too complex for me, and I prefer to wait for their new launch. Thanks!
Thanks! I’ll definitely look into hook.
I use Devonthink or Bear links within Things to handle attachments.
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I think my question would be: do you actually want the app to host the files themselves (I.e. they are copies of files elsewhere in your system), or are you only wanting the files to be linked to the task?
Asking for attachments makes me think you want the former (like how email attachments are copies of files), but that makes me personally wince a bit because
A) You’re going to have a lot of duplication, and
B) the question then becomes “where are these files being saved? On whose servers? Can you even attach e.g. work files on a third party system?”
Personally I would tease out what problem you’d like to solve first.
E.g. Trello can host attachments. Since at my work that would duplicate files we already have in GDrive and require more data security screening, we don’t use this function and just link to the GDrive files instead.
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Todoist can do that.
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This is an argument, I often read about apps like Omnifocus, but I also often wonder, why it would not be a “solution”, to use the functions someone wants to use, and simply “ignore” everything else?
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Good points that I haven’t considered before. Using links I think will do what I need, even using apps like hook.
Because of… visual clutter? It takes so much time to enter tasks with metadata as well. It’s too busy for me. Todoist is simpler and visually less cluttered.
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I believe that OmniFocus allows both creating links to files and embedding the files into the task. In the latter case, the file will them be sync’d if you use Omni’s sync server and the file can be seen on any other device that syncs to your database. I have not tried this, so I cannot vouch for this functionality.
I use Things, and my approach is to attach a note to the task with file URL links to the files that I want. When I click the link in the note, a Finder window opens up with the file selected and I have to then open it myself. Not quite as slick as using OF, but thus far works for me.
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Do you use hook for the links?
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Im glad to see this mentioned here. I love Hook for this ability to grab a link virtually anywhere in the environment and attach the link wherever I choose.
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I do not. I purchased Hook, but it did not click for me at the onset, and I have not had the time to invest to figure out how to use it effectively.
I just create url links to the files, eg of the form file:///Users//Documents/thisfile.txt.
I am in the process of finishing a workflow. I very commonly download pdf references that I want/need to read, I do these downloads at work where there are institutional subscriptions to the journals I follow, and I am doing this on Windows (being that it is the work computer). What I am finishing up is that I email the files to my personal email address with a subject that starts with a specific key sequence that I can detect with a Mail.app rule.
The rule runs an AppleScript that saves the content of the email to my reading folder. I will have KM run a script periodically that will process these files, extract the attachments, and create the file:/// links to each file, then create a task in Things using the email subject and attaching the note with the file:/// links.
There’s a bit more (I can attach Zip archives that are extracted, and direct the attachments to subfolders of my reading folder via encoding in the subject) but that’s the gist of it.
So I am just using regular file URLs and not Hook links. I believe (but am not sure) that Hook supports apple script, so down the link if I wind up using Hook I would change this workflow accordingly.
(BTW: before anyone tells me that Hazel is ideal for triggering on these files and running the scripts to process them, I know, and I have a huge number of Hazel rules. I specifically did not use Hazel here for a practical reason. My email provider limits the size of a message to 20K, and therefore it is not infrequent that the files I am sending exceed the limit and so I have to send several emails breaking up the attachments. However, I want them all aggregated into one task in Things. My script accepts multiple email messages in one invocation, and aggregates the files for any emails that have identical subjects, to handle this specific issue. If it were not for this, eg if I could just send an arbitrary amount of data in a single email, then Hazel would have been my go to.)
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I’ve been using Todoist for years. Can attach all sorts of documents.
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Thanks for letting me know.
I use NotePlan nowadays and that lets you link to stuff. It might be a bit too basic for what you’re after though (it’s a task manager in markdown). Most the things I want to link to are messages, Trello cards, etc, and it formats it all very nicely.
Apple’s Reminders lets you link to stuff too I think - certainly files in Apple’s ecosystem. @Bmosbacker will have more advice here if you’re keen to learn what file types you can link, but you can definitely link tasks to emails (which is great!).