Trying to make it all work
 

Hi,
I am new to OF and GTD. Since picking it up at MacWorld, OF has been an enormous help in organizing my days, which is really saying something, given how crazy it can get sometimes. As a result, I picked up a copy of GTD and am working my way through it.

There was one aspect of the GTD approach that I don't seem to see implemented in OF, and I am wondering how people are handling it. This concerns ideas that I want to keep around for reference, but that don't reflect actions. As a variation, some actions (email correspondence, for instance) result in information that I want to keep handy.

While this kind of information is a part of GTD, I don't see a way to handle it well from withing OF. One possibility that I am entertaining is to keep a separate set of linked files in Omni Outliner. These could be attached to a reminder to review and update from time to time.

How are other people handling this?

Thanks,
Dan

I use another application for reference material, DEVONthink Pro Office (DTPO). Others use Yojimbo and other apps whose names elude me at the moment. It is also possible to just use Spotlight . . . I think Toadling is doing this.

Your idea of using OO for reference material related to active projects is a good one; but, again, I think that DTPO or Yojimbo might be better suited to your needs.

It depends on the nature of the reference materials.

If they are ideas that you are jotting down, try:
Journler
Mori
Circus Ponies Notebook
Notetaker
Tinderbox
One big text file (see 43folders.com about this)
OmniOutliner


If they are independent files (pdfs, webarchives, images, etc), try
Together
DevonThink Pro
Yojimbo
EagleFiler
Finder + Spotlight
Finder + Leap

Yucca has already given you the basics, and I agree: DEVONthink Pro, Yojimbo, Together, Eagle Filer, Journler, etc. are all strong contenders. Personally, I used Yojimbo for over a year and always enjoyed its clean, simple interface and the ease of adding new items. However, I believe Yojimbo is targeted more as a "snippet keeper" than a heavy duty archival system.

Since upgrading to Leopard last fall, I switched to archiving all my reference material in the Finder. Grouped in only about a dozen folders, I heavily depend on Spotlight searches, LaunchBar, and Quick Look for finding and accessing files. Of course, there's no official tagging support (other than simple Spotlight Comments) and there are no relevance rankings on searches or anything fancy like that. But for basic data archival, it's working quite well. It also fits in nicely with Time Machine's file-based backups (as opposed to Yojimbo, which uses a monolithic database that can grow quite large). My current reference library has about 17,000 files for about 4.5 GB of disk space, although I regularly use only about a third of those.

When I have a project or action in OmniFocus that is associated with some piece of reference material, I link the corresponding file(s) from my archive into OmniFocus by simply dragging them onto the project or action. OmniFocus creates an alias to each file so that it can be previewed from within OmniFocus with Quick Look by hitting the spacebar or opened by double-clicking on it.