Information Storage
 

Does information storage belong in OmniFocus? I'm unsure.

I was listening to Merlin's podcast episode titled "[URL="http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/26/phone-human-ass/"]A phone made of human ass[/URL]"

Apart from the good laughs, it taught me that there are things I need to keep stored for a long time, and add a bit a time, that will eventually become useful.

I could use a program like Devon Think. But wouldn't that make "two trusted systems"?

What do you think?

I say no. The reason being: Any GTD system is going to have a lot of stuff that is worthless to keep; much more than it will have worth keeping. There are a lot of projects and tasks that I wish to keep documentation on for future reference, but if the same system that collected them was used to archive them, it would become quite a monumental task to weed it from the hundreds of chaff tasks around it.

In system that I've been using for several years now, I built a little checkmark into each action. If I feel that action is worthy of archival, I check it off as I check off the completion checkmark. At the end of every day, I file all of my completed actions into archival bins and forget about them. Eventually when there is a couple hundred of them, I run an export template against those archival bins that puts all of these reference worthy items into the MultiMarkdown format which I find useful as an archival format for its functional readability. These get imported into the archive database application of my preference. Then I dump all of the old actions into an archive file separate from the GTD file. This keeps the GTD file clean and not too heavy-weight with years of "print out the article on speculative evolution," and whatnot.

Something like that would be useful in OF. If you could tag an old action as "Keep," and then export all of these periodically to some useful format it would solve the need for back-reference while not having to dig through months of chaff. Tag it while it is hot.

I vote no. I think storing documents & files in OmniFu would make it unwieldy. Then again, maybe not.

I guess I'd like the option of not having to use it for storage. One reason I don't use Midnight's Inbox is because it doesn't give me a choice. I don't need it or want it to organize my hard drive, or collect all the junk I have stored in there.

I'm not opposed to it storing stuff, I guess. If it's going to do that, I guess my main concern is that offers me great flexibility in how I organize my storage. I have a hard time imagining how OmniFu could offer a flexible, extensible structure, but that doesn't mean it's impossible... Okay, I'm changing my "no" to a "maybe."

I would like be able to drag aliases to documents and files on my hard drive into OmniFu.

GTD is not about document storage. Use spotlight, or Google Notebook, or one of the many other apps. Heck, use OO.

GTD, and OmniFocus, is about Projects, Tasks, Contexts, Notes, Events and syncing.

BZ

Another no
 

I would also vote no to absorbing content wholesale. However, I need to be able to link to content in the form of files and folders, and I'd like to be able to incorporate those links into textual commentary related to tasks and project plans. Thus I want to manage links to single and grouped documents along with GTD-style to do lists and periodic review capabilities. The attachment mechanism in OmniOutliner that allows you to drag documents and folders into the text to create "lozenge" shaped links is a nice implementation for this.

Now, if those attached documents could be indexed for searching without being imported, that would be interesting. Perhaps the best and least duplicative approach would be if the program could target Spotlight searches to both its contained and attached content, if such a thing is possible.