Omnifocus as a Tool for Lists, not Tasks

Posted by avernet
Mar 21, 2019 at 10:30 PM

Hi Beck,

I hadn’t read what the David Allen Company had to say about OmniFocus, but what you’re describing seems somewhat in line with the way I’ve been using OmniFocus, even all the way back to version 1. For instance, for most projects (i.e. whatever outcome requires more than 1 step to accomplish), I would have (a) links e.g. to specific email threads, (b) my current analysis of the situation, and (c) a log of the actions/communication related to that project. As a result, a project would often have very few actual next actions (most often just 1), but many more other “tasks” used to keep track of (a)+(b)+(c) in an outline manner.

The upside of this approach is that you can keep reference material along your projects/next actions. If you have a large number of projects, lots of churn in your projects (say every day half a dozen of them get completed and another half a dozen are created), you’re saving quite a bit of time compared to an approach where you’re creating one part in OmniFocus and the other part in Bear, Evernote, WorkFlowy, or similar. You don’t have to create for each project something in 2 systems. You don’t have to create for each project 2-way links between the 2 systems. You don’t have to maintain a similar folder hierarchy in 2 systems. When looking for something, you don’t have to do so in 2 systems.

However, the downside is that OmniFocus isn’t designed to be used this way. You’ll have issues with performance. I’ve had in the order of 50,000 tasks stored in OmniFocus, and even with way less than that (around 10,000), certain operations can be completely unusable on the iOS app (like searching), or painfully slow (like navigating in the project view). The app can also change in ways that break your system. For instance, OmniFocus 2 for iPhone was showing only one level of the outline at a time. So if you had a project holding 3 level outline, each level having 10 items, you’d have 10*10*10 = 1000 items in that project (plus 110 grouping items), and could easily navigate through those 1110 items on the iPhone because you would only see 10 at a time. Switch to OmniFocus 3 on your iPhone, and all 1110 are shown in a single list which makes it practically unusable.

So I can’t recommend using OmniFocus this way. Which is too bad, because it is tempting to look at OmniFocus as an outliner in which you can put any type of items (project, reference, next actions, logs…), but with the ability to attach to each item tags, files (images, audio recording), and dates (start date, due date, notifications), and the ability to create views on the content based on search/tags/dates, all this in a tool actively being developed and supported on Apple platforms.

If anyone knows of an alternative software (or approach), please let us know!

‑Alex