Much of creative work is about setting conditions. One of those conditions is ease of access. Searching for the stuff we need to do can drag us down. Having to search for materials can hamper, if not stop work from moving forward. Personally, I find the search task as easily in my top 3 types of nuisance tasks.

Linking directly to the materials of work from a task can make a significant difference. when we can get to work with minimal thought or effort, showing up becomes that much easier.

Today’s post is a follow up to the Ulysses linking article where we looked at how we can link to a specific sheet in Ulysses in OSX. Here, we’ll simply look at how we can perform the same function in iOS.

Ulysses is a robust writing program available on iOS and OSX. With it, we can create many individual “sheets” of writing, and then group, filter, and sort them in many ways. When there are many sheets, however, it can be extra work to have to dive down into the various tags and hierarchies of folders to find the specific piece of writing we were last working on.

To make things easier, we can use a “Callback URL”.  The URL links directly to the sheet we want to work on.  The setting, however, is somewhat hidden.

Getting the Callback URL

To access the Callback URL:

• Go to the page where you see the sheet of interest.
• Select “Select” in the top right:

Selecing “Select” at the Ulysses Inbox

• Choose the sheet of interest:

Selecting a sheet in Ulysses

• Choose “More…” in the bottom right:

Selecting “More…” to access more menu options

• Choose “Share…” from the menu:

Select “Share…”

• Choose Copy Callback URL:

Select Copy Callback URL

Adding the Callback link in OmniFocus

To add the URL to an OmniFocus task:

• Open OmniFocus.
• Create a task.
• Go to the Notes tab of that task.
• Tap the writing area to bring up the Paste option:

Tap notes area to bring up Paste option

• Select “Paste”:

Ulysses callback pasted in OmniFocus task

You now have a way of easily accessing that specific writing.

You could, for instance, further develop the creative task by adding a flag and a Defer Again repeat:

Seting creative task conditions

Now, the link in the note field will be carried to any newly created tasks when one is marked complete. This way, you could work on the task for a bit, mark it complete, and the task will appear again with a link ready to go at the next session interval.