Omnifocus as a Tool for Lists, not Tasks

Posted by avernet
Mar 22, 2019 at 04:36 AM

Beck wrote:
>So I presume you are still using it this way even though you experience
>its shortcomings? Or have you migrated your notes away from your tasks
>in some other system?

I’m still using OmniFocus, but have, since the beginning of last year, switched to using notes more extensively:

- In the “projects” part of the system, all the project-reference-material now takes the form of nested bullets in a note for the project. As a result, the only actions in the project really are for next actions.
- In the “reference” part of the system, I try to put as much as possible (and makes sense) in notes as well. So where before I might have had an action with say 5 nested actions, each with 5 nested actions, I would now have those 5+5*5 items as lines of text in the note of an action.

In notes, I use nested “bullet points” using a Markdown syntax. The upside is that this reduces the number of actions in the system by a factor somewhere between 10x and 100x, making some operations, like browsing and searching, possible again on the iPhone. The downside is that using Markdown as an outlining tool is at times just painful: I don’t get any folding, and have to copy the text to a text editor to perform some operations, like indenting or moving blocks. And there is some irony in having to do all this gymnastic with notes in OmniFocus, which is otherwise a quite competent outliner.

So again, I’m not sure that using notes this way is something that I would recommend.
If you or anyone has any suggestion on how to improve this, I’m listening!

‑Alex