

It’s not terribly difficult to hack together a simple script that can create all of my parking tasks for the next year and output a text file: - 2023 Parking Schedule Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on House Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) Park on Opposite Side of Street 5:00) 22:00) the project to OmniFocus is as easy as copy-pasting the text. #!/usr/bin/ruby require 'date' def task (d, location ) " - Park on #_parking_schedule.taskpaper" OmniFocus supports pasting TaskPaper formatted text to create tasks. TaskPaper is a to-do list application for MacOS which defines a plain text format to express tasks with defer dates, due dates, contexts, etc. One of the lesser known features of OmniFocus is its ability to import TaskPaper documents. So even if OmniFocus supported schedules like “every first Tuesday”, it wouldn’t handle the case “the day before the first Thursday of the month between October and May”. To make this schedule even more complicated, I’d like the task to appear the day before the parking restriction, not the day of. I’d like to have an OmniFocus task to remind me to move my car to the correct side of the street.


Also, this schedule is only in effect between October and May. The other side is restricted on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month. Parking is restricted on one side of the street on the first and third Tuesday of the month.

Portland restricts parking on one side of the street or the other so that the city can remove snow during the winter months. One of these problems is on-street parking in my neighborhood in Portland, Maine. One problem in particular is scheduling recurring tasks according to complex schedules. That said, I do occasionally run into limitations with the software. It’s pricey compared to other solutions, but it’s worth every penny and it has features that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. OmniFocus has been my task manager of choice since 2008.
