Back in January, DocumentSnap reader Jos van de Voort van de Kleij wrote in with a question: How could he use his ScanSnap S1300 to scan directly to his OmniFocus inbox?
Now, despite the writing and podcasting of David Sparks, Ben Brooks, and Merlin Mann, I have not yet taken the plunge and started using OmniFocus. However, I was at Macworld at the time, so I went to the Omni booth to ask for suggestions, and they pointed me to the Omni Forums.
After some great help from the Omni folks, Jos has worked out a workflow that lets him scan to his OmniFocus Inbox. Now, why would he want to do this? Here are his words:
Remember: this workflow allows you to create paperless “ticklers” in OmniFocus therefore eliminating the need for the 43 folders as described in the book by David Allen. As an example you could scan a bill, give it a “pay by” date and it will disappear from your radar until the date comes to pay the bill. You will have the scan of the bill to support preparing the payment. When done you click the action completed and it goes away automatically. Yet another step in going paperless!
Sounds good to me. Here are the steps to get it done.
Set Up The A Folder Action
- Download the OmniFocus Applescript to somewhere on your computer
- Unzip it
- Drop the script into this folder:Macintosh HD>Library>Scripts>Folder Action Scripts
- Find or create a folder that you are going to want to scan/save to
- Right-click on this folder, and select Services>Folder Actions Setup
- Select the “Add files as OmniFocus actions” script
- Click Attach
Now you have a folder where any time a file gets saved there, it automatically gets imported to OmniFocus.
Set Up Your Scanner
Set up your scanner to scan to this folder (in my case I called it “To OmniFocus”).
If you are using a ScanSnap, you can set up a profile for this.
On the Application tab, choose Scan To File (or, if you want to be able to rename it first, Scan To Folder)
On the Save tab, browse to your OmniFocus scan folder that you created earlier.
For the rest of the tabs, set whichever options you prefer.
Scan To OmniFocus!
Once this is all set up, you are good to go. Select your OmniFocus profile, hit Scan, and the Quick Entry window should pop up.
Do whatever you OmniFocus people do there, and hit Save. The task will then be created with your scanned document as an attachment in your OmniFocus Inbox.
Since we’re talking OmniFocus, any other OF devotees out there that have tips or tricks for how they reference their documents from it? Let us know in the comments.
