Member
2009-11-04, 01:15 PM
I'm also a longtime fan of mindmapping... Many aspects of planning projects and schedules seem much more intuitive to me using a mindmap rather than a sequential list. I've found a (low-tech) way to integrate Omnifocus and Xmind. It works pretty well for me.
Here's what I do... I track all my tasks in OF, and use Perspectives to generate a view of tasks to do Today. I refine the list using Flags, filtering it down to those items I really, truly want to do today. Once I've got that, I manually copy the tasks to Xmind -- where I can sort them into mindmap branches, however best suits my planning. (I sometimes sort into major contexts and "hats" -- but almost always end up sorting into the various time-blocks that constitute my day.)
Copying from OF to Xmind is quite simple--but there's a trick. Essentially, it's a mere matter of selecting the tasks in OF, copying, and pasting them into the desired location in Xmind (whatever branch I'd like). The wrinkle is this: in the current version of Xmind for Mac, pasting that way will not generate a separate branch for each task, but rather one single cell on a branch, with all the tasks in a single text block. The best workaround I've found is to do an intermediate step: before pasting into Xmind, I paste the tasks, unformatted, into a NeoOffice text document, then re-copy. Not sure precisely why, but the result is that when I now paste the list into Xmind, each task shows up on a separate branch (the way I want it).
This workflow is a lot less cumbersome than it sounds -- and lets me track tasks with the power of OF, yet move my scheduled tasks for a particular day (or week) around with ease. My left brain and right brain are on speaking terms again. =)