What do you use for Notes / References?
 

I moved from Toodledo to OF. I like that Toodledo has a Notes section that stores whatever snippets of plain text you need in the same app as their task manager. Dave Allen recommends that we distinguish nonactionable tidbit of information as Reference. I use the Notes feature to keep track of addresses I might refer to once in a while when I don't want it in my contacts list, to keep track of call details whenever having a billing dispute, to keep track of things I loaned out or borrowed, etc.

Since we don't have that feature with OF, what do you guys use? And does it offer good integration with OF and GTD?

Projects and Tasks do have Note fields.

Beyond that, some folks here swear by DevonThink, especially for its integration with OmniFocus via Applescript.

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JJW

I use DevonThink myself. The desktop version is awesome. But the iPhone/iPad version DevonThink To Go is mostly used as a reader app. IMHO DevonThink To Go needs a lot of work. There is no cloud sync solution for DevonThink. You can connect your iOS device to your Mac and then sync documents to DevonThink To Go that way but there is no cloud access.

I've seen some people use Evernote as a file reference because it is a cloud solution. Documents are stored on the cloud to enable ubiquitous access to your files from anywhere.

Maybe you can create a context called "Notes" and set the context's status to "On Hold" (control-click on a context and select "On Hold"). This should keep your notes hidden from active context view but you can still see it in project mode.

I usually don't like mixing my notes with my tasks.

[QUOTE=gattaca;119532]Since we don't have that feature with OF, what do you guys use? And does it offer good integration with OF and GTD?[/QUOTE]

I use DEVONThink. I do not want any cloud sync at all for security reasons and DT is far more capable than Evernote IMO. I am setting up my physical paper filing, my main mac filing and my DT filing with the same categories/folders. For small projects I put the reference material in the note field in OF.

Like others here, I use DEVONthink Pro Office as my store of reference material. You can easily copy a link to any note or document and paste that link into the notes field of OmniFocus. A nice touch is that if you have that same note/document synced into DEVONthink To Go (on your iOS device), the links still work on your mobile device!

Just a note that while DEVONthink is fantastic on the Mac, the iOS app (DEVONthink To Go) is pretty sad--like someone said above, is basically only useful as a reader for stuff that you need to sync to your mobile.

I certainly had this very issue and started with MS Onenote which was fine until my company switched to Google everything. I since found Evernote and it is great. I put all reference material there as David Allen suggests. He was actually the keynote at Evernote's conference this year and spoke about just this issue (reference vs. action).

To get an integration between my action items and reference, there wasn't a good solution. So, I built one. It's called [URL="http://www.taskclone.com"]TaskClone[/URL]. It essentially allows you to take notes normally (e.g. meetings) and then identify the tasks in the notes with Evernote checkboxes. TaskClone then extracts or "clones" the tasks in the background (via Evernote's Cloud API) and sends them to Omnifocus as tasks. A link back to the Evernote note is added as a note to the task.

It's not the holy grail of a two-way sync, but it solved my issues and I didn't want to manage tasks in Evernote anyway. There are many happy OF users taking advantage of it currently.

We also added the ability to turn items into Google Calendar events as well since many times follow-up meetings are scheduled during the process of taking meeting notes.

Visit the homepage or see a quick 2min video on the process.
[URL="http://www.taskclone.com"]http://www.taskclone.com[/URL]
[URL="http://youtu.be/5AqgVbfk6Ig"]http://youtu.be/5AqgVbfk6Ig[/URL]

[QUOTE=DrJJWMac;119544]Projects and Tasks do have Note fields.

Beyond that, some folks here swear by DevonThink, especially for its integration with OmniFocus via Applescript.

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JJW[/QUOTE]

Agreed. DEVONthink Pro Office and OF are my two must haves.