Jamie Thingelstad

OmniFocus 4.5.2 shipped recently and with it was this little snippet in the release notes.

Shortcuts — Sync OmniFocus action has been added.

This caught my eye and I was sort of looking for it. When I listened to Omni Group’s 2025 Roadmap on the Omni Show Ken Case made a reference to creating an automation to sync his OmniFocus tasks. I thought that was a great idea and tried to figure out how to make that work and didn’t find an easy way to do it. When I saw this new Shortcut action I connected the dots. Case was referring to a not-yet-released version.

Now why would you want such an action? OmniFocus sync is super capable for me. I’ve never had it lose data and it is super stable. With that said, when a device gets very far behind, meaning it hasn’t been synced for days or weeks, the “log of updates” gets longer and longer. This causes sync to get slower on all your devices and the device that is out-of-date takes longer to get caught up. To be fair, none of this really impacts my user experience more than a couple seconds but I like to keep my devices in sync and ready to go.

This is where less often used devices become an issue. I regularly will go a couple of days without using my iPad. And my Vision Pro may go a week or two in between sessions. Both of these devices have OmniFocus natively and the sync backlog could get long — particularly on the Vision Pro. Using this Shortcut along with a time-based Automation this is no longer anything to be concerned with. Now early in the morning before I’m up my iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro automatically sync OmniFocus and are ready for each day. No long “log of updates” and when I do go to them it is super fast to get caught up.

Now if I could only do a Shortcut Automation like this on my Apple Watch. That is the last device I have that routinely gets very behind, and sync to OmniFocus on the Watch is slow. I’m sure Omni is working on that!