--- id: project-templates title: Project Templates summary: The OmniFocus project templates Jamie has kept since 2017, and the private site he built in 2026 to fill them in and send them to OmniFocus. collection: Personal tools and making status: active url: null started: 2017-05 topics: - automation sources: - kind: website url: https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/05/19/using-project-templates.html role: reference - kind: website url: https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/79/ role: reference - kind: website url: https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/10/01/task-management-for.html role: reference - kind: website url: https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/09/02/my-gtd-structure.html role: reference - kind: website url: https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/05/06/how-to-newsletter-lessons-from.html role: reference connections: - to: weekly-thing label: plans every issue of detail: Each issue of the Weekly Thing starts as an OmniFocus project made from the Send Weekly Thing template, with the issue number and publish date filled in. source: https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/10/01/task-management-for.html artifacts: - file: home.png title: The list of templates caption: The home page, with the templates whose time of year is near under Coming up, and the day each was last made. The templates shown are made up for this picture. date: 2026-11-09 url: https://thingelstad.xyz/things/project-templates/artifacts/home.png - file: fill-in.png title: Filling in a template caption: A template’s page. Set the values and the preview works out every defer and due date before the project goes to OmniFocus. A made-up template. date: 2026-11-09 url: https://thingelstad.xyz/things/project-templates/artifacts/fill-in.png - file: last-time.png title: Last time caption: The page compares the template with the project it made last time, read from OmniFocus each Sunday, listing the tasks added by hand and the ones left out. The project shown is made up. date: 2026-11-09 url: https://thingelstad.xyz/things/project-templates/artifacts/last-time.png page: https://thingelstad.xyz/things/project-templates/ --- # Project Templates The OmniFocus project templates Jamie has kept since 2017, and the private site he built in 2026 to fill them in and send them to OmniFocus. Project Templates is the set of checklists Jamie keeps for the things he does more than once: a holiday, a business trip, readying the house and the cabin for winter, an issue of the Weekly Thing. Each one becomes a project in OmniFocus, the task manager he has used for [Getting Things Done](https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/10/01/task-management-for.html) for as long as he can remember, with the dates worked out for this time. He came to them late. In May 2017 he wrote [Using Project Templates](https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/05/19/using-project-templates.html): he had “seen and read about people using project templates for a while” but found the ways of managing them “bothersome.” The post sorts them into frequent activities, several copies of one thing, and things done rarely, and the last was his favorite: “It feels like a way to apply continuous learning to things you do once a year.” His first example was changing the clocks for Daylight Saving Time, a list in walking order through the house that includes the aquarium light timer he tended to miss. Most templates end with a task to “Update template with any changes from this year.” The templates are written in TaskPaper, with «Variables» in French quotation marks for the parts that change. By November 2018 a Shortcut ran each one, and [Weekly Thing 79](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/79/) says why the format stayed: “I continue to store my templates in TaskPaper format to make them easy to edit, but the power comes in the Shortcut.” Those Shortcuts also blocked time on his calendar and drafted emails for a project. The [Send Weekly Thing template](https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/10/01/task-management-for.html) has two variables, «Issue» and «Date», and OmniFocus works out every other date from them. He chose templates over OmniFocus’s repeating projects on purpose: “Not having it repeating means I can change and alter any given instance however I like.” In 2025 he [said it again](https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/05/06/how-to-newsletter-lessons-from.html): “I like templates more than repeating projects because they let me make adjustments for each issue.” He kept the reminders to make them in OmniFocus too, in a [Repeating Projects list](https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/09/02/my-gtd-structure.html) of tasks like “Create project to winterize house,” each linking to its template in Drafts or to the Shortcut that makes the project. In November 2026 he moved the templates out of Drafts and built a small site for them with coding agents. It runs on his own Mac and is reached only from his private network, because the templates hold family and household details. Each template is a TaskPaper file with a short header that says what each variable is and when the template usually starts. The site shows what is coming up in the next month, fills in the values, works out the dates itself, and hands the finished project to OmniFocus through its paste link. Once a week it reads OmniFocus, never writing to it, so each template’s page can show the project it made last time: how far along it is, the tasks Jamie added by hand, and the template tasks it went without. So what changed last time is on the page when he makes the next one.