OmniFocus

Obsidian is where I think; OmniFocus is where I commit. Keeping those two systems separate is deliberate — a notes app that also tries to be a task manager tends to do both jobs poorly, and a task manager cluttered with reference material stops being trustworthy as a list of things that need doing.

Setup

• Waves of Focus, not vanilla GTD. Rather than one flat next-actions list, tasks live in one of four real lists that function as capacity tiers: Engaged (a handful of tasks getting active creative/emotional energy right now), Steady (recurring, low-energy reminders), Horizon (next up, deliberately held rather than active), and a Distant Horizons/overflow tier for everything else on hold. Moving a task between tiers is a deliberate promotion, not a re-tag.
• A single custom perspective is the daily interface. Rather than reading raw tier lists, a saved perspective filters to what’s actually available today, respecting defer dates — a raw tier can look over its own budget while the filtered view is correctly sized, because deferred items are hidden from the filtered view but not from a naive read of the raw list.
• Projects mirror Areas/Projects in Obsidian, but stay one-way. A project in OmniFocus can reference the related Obsidian note for context, but Obsidian never tries to track task completion. One system owns “is this done,” full stop — daily and weekly notes in the vault mirror the current tiers, they don’t drive them.
• Weekly review is non-negotiable. Every week: review each tier against its own budget, confirm the low-energy tier’s items are still genuinely recurring (a one-off dropped there because it feels easy will sit forever, since it has no real recurrence to trigger it again), and count leaf tasks only — a parent container and its children can both misleadingly read as incomplete.

Automation

• A local MCP server for programmatic query/add/batch access — the same mechanism that lets an assistant like Claude read or update tasks directly, without retyping them by hand. Kept to personal devices only, the same personal/professional boundary drawn everywhere else on this site.
• URL-scheme automation (omnifocus:///add, .../paste, .../perspective/<name>) for adding tasks, bulk-pasting a planned week in one shot, and deep-linking a specific task back into a note.

Why not just use tasks in Obsidian

Plugins exist to do this, and I’ve tried them. What OmniFocus does better for me: a tiered-capacity model and review cadence built into daily use, a perspective that actually filters on defer dates, and a task engine that isn’t also trying to render a graph of thousands of notes. Splitting the two concerns across two tools has been more reliable than one tool trying to do both.

See Performance Tuning and Keeping Updated for the maintenance side of this.