Text messages to tasks / OmniFocus /

Software
, ,
1

I receive a lot of text messages from potential candidates as well as current employees. I am looking for a way to get those messages that need follow-up into my task, Omni-Focus or anywhere where I can be sure I follow-up on them versus just leaving them unread. Any advise / recommendations would be very much appreciated.

2

You can get Shortcuts to get the contents of unread messages and put them in Omnifocus. But there’s a few hurdles to figure out

  • it won’t mark them as read, so if you run it more than once you get the same messages as tasks. But you can at least specify Today. So it could be run once at the end of the day perhaps.
  • it puts them in one task, so you’ll have to play around with splitting the text to get them into separate tasks. This is doable I imagine, but might be fiddly.
  • it won’t pull out the phone number. Not the end of the world but it would be handy.

I imagine r/shortcuts might be a good place to get more details. Implementation for this stuff always gets convoluted.

1 Like
3

In the Messages app, you can copy the text of a message. You could then run a Shortcut that creates a new OmniFocus task — for example, “Follow up on text message from [NAME]” — and pastes the copied message into the note field.

You’d need to enter the name manually using the Ask for Input action, but otherwise it’s straightforward. You could also have the Shortcut send tasks to a specific project or tag if your text messages usually relate to certain areas.

4

I just copy the text. “Hey Siri, remind me about this message” also pulls the reminder into OF. It doesn’t link back to messages, just makes the contact name or the phone number the task. That’s a little cryptic, but it works as a memory jog.

5

You can also use OmniFocus’ Mail Drop, it assigns you a forwarding “@sync.omnigroup.com” email address.

It even allows you to create multiple addresses.

https://support.omnigroup.com/omnifocus-mail-drop/

6

I use Popclip’s OmniFocus extension for this purpose.

3 Likes
7

Hey,

Based on my Shortcuts automation for emails, you can do the same thing for Messages whenever a new SMS comes in. You should be able to add an OmniFocus task the same way as with Reminders.

Tip: in the “Message contains …” field of the automation, you probably need to just put a blank space so it doesn’t filter by sender or keywords.

Hope it helps!