[QUOTE=JKT]What if it is an unnecessary part of the project, but would be icing on the cake if you could do it? E.g. a figure might not absolutely require redrawing, but if it was, it could be made to look better? That is, it is an aspiration, not a goal. (Note, not being [I]au fait[/I] with GTD semantics, I suspect that this is probably not a strict part of the methodology but OF should be flexible enough to cater to people like me who don't want to be strait-jacketed by the one, true method while rigid enough to let people use it who do).[/QUOTE]

Your question could be re-phrased, "What if there's a task I that may or may not actually be committed to doing?" In the world of GTD, the answer is that that task should not appear on the project llist. Putting that task on your list (or removing items) would be part of your weekly review of your projects.

The point is that you should not be deciding what's on or off the list when you're getting things done. A commercial pilot does not think about the things that are on his takeoff/landing checklist; he just does them. He might want to add/remove/modify something on those lists, but he would never ever do that during an actual takeoff/landing.

I was recently in David's "GTD Roadmap" seminar ( [url]www.davidco.com[/url] ). One point: he doesn't drive his major projects off of a GTD list; they are typically backed up with project descriptions in some other form. The typical form for David is a Mind Map. When he's in the trenches, he goes off of the lists; when he's reviewing his projects, he may modify his lists at that point. Much of the power of GTD comes from the separating of doing and planning.

OmniFocus should remain a simple application. It is not necessarily the entire existence system for your projects -- especially your major ones. Clearly, OmniFocus should allow one to create [launchable] references to whatever structures you use outside of OmniFocus to back up the simple GTD list of that project.

As you note, it may be useful to become au fait with GTD to understand this software better. In my model of the world, it is <i>precisely</i> the simplicity of things like OmniFocus that will make useful for the low-level implementation of my GTD system.

Read "Getting Things Done" and then "Ready for Anything."

--phil

I agree with phil about the need to keep OF as simple as possible. However, I think it is fair for most users to expect that OF will meet 90% of their list and project management needs (as these are the aspects of GTD that OF seems aimed at filling). I am sure that, from Omni's point of view, they will want to point to another Omni product that answers that remaining 10%. For project managment, that remaining 10% is OmniPlan. For your reference system that remaining 10% might be OmniOutliner.

I think we all agree that someday/maybe is NOT a project. However, I am going to suggest that, if the current OF approach to dealing with someday/maybe is too distasteful, once again OO maybe the way to go. However, I did see one of the alpha testers mentioning that he was using another OF file for someday/maybe - as it made it easy to transfer an item to the "active" file.

In any event, maybe it would be useful for someone at Omni to map Omni's products to the GTD methodology. That way we are not complaining about stuff that Omni in general and OF in particular never intended to address.