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.