Templates Vs Checklists...
 

Hi.
I have almost finished organizing everything in OF.

However, I notice I have a few weekly repeating projects that have many tasks and task groups.
At first, I set these projects as Templates and set them to Hold. Later, when my Core view reminds me I must do that project every week, I could duplicate it, make the dup active again and flag it...

BUT, that would be duplicating long projects every week in OF's database. (My computer is a first generation MacBook Pro, and my Home Folder is encrypted, so it easily gets bogged down).

Would it be better to just use that "Template project" as a check-list instead?
IOW, just keep using that same project (not duplicating it). If I finished it last week, it would appear with all the checkmarks as completed, but I could simply unchek them and give it a start date of today (or a flag) and start over... This way I'd be using the same project and only keep moving it around.

How do you guys handle this?
Or would it be better to do these long repeating projects in OmniPlan?

BTW, these projects I mentioned MUST be finished the day they appear in my Core, so they are really checklists.

Thank you for your advice.

An approach taken by some for these checklist projects (whether they have the tight constraints on when they need to be completed or not) is to simply have a single action in OmniFocus, with a link to the file containing the checklist (in OmniOutliner or whatever app you prefer). The OF action just says "Do the Daylight Savings Time checklist, and OmniFocus accumulates a minimal amount of clutter from actions you need to complete, but where you maybe don't need to log the details. Curt Clifton talks about his approach in [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=10626"]this thread[/URL] (including opening the checklist files directly as iCal events, so bypassing OmniFocus entirely; I dislike iCal, so I prefer to have the checklist anchored in OmniFocus, but both approaches work well).

Awesome!
I have OmniPlan. I haven't really studied at depth, but I'll experiment to see if I can use it for these checklists. Otherwise, you just gave me the perfect excuse I needed to buy OmniOutliner too :>)

And that link you gave me has a great iCal tip! (now I can have iCal automatically open the apps I need whenever I want to. I've been using alarms for ever and never noticed the "Open File" option).

I LOVE automating this stuff.

Thank you, whpalmer.

Sure, you could make the checklists in OmniPlan, and just not bother with all of its features that you would normally use. But as you're looking for an excuse to buy OmniOutliner, let me assure you that OmniPlan wouldn't work at all ;-)