For the past several months I've been trying out 2Do as my task manager. While there are many complicated reasons for my tentative, and possibly temporary, move away from OmniFocus the main reason for the switch is templates.

As explained on the Cortex podcast I run my whole life as a series of checklists, which was only possible with OmniFocus on the Mac and only with now-abandoned 3rd party software.

Looking for replacements on iOS yielded exactly one: 2Do. While it doesn't have native template support, it does have a decent plugin for Workflow which allowed me to write a template creation script on iOS.

How To Make Templates on 2DO

1) Get Workflow

2) Download my script

3) Understand the syntax:

Inside of the script is a text box where you can paste your own project template. Each task needs to be on its own line:

Example task 3 $variable | tag1, tag2 | 3 | 4

The first text before the pipe is the name of the task. It can include a variable that is the same as the project name. For example my videos have task items with names like:

Write draft 3 for $variable

Where $variable is the name of the video.

After the second pipe can come any number of tags separated by commas.

The final two pipes are for defining variable start and due dates. When the template runs it asks for a project due date. The first number is how many days before the project due date the individual task should be due. The second number is how many days before the project is due. This can also be replaced by a NULL (as shown in the template) to give the task no start date so that it is immediately available.

When run, the script defaults to dumping all the tasks and the project into a list called 'Templates'. This allows you on iOS to easily bulk move all the tasks into the project and them move the project to wherever you want in your system.