The outline structure of OmniFocus is one of its key strengths – loosely sketching an outline, quickly pruning and reorganising it for tighter integration, these are key to most kinds of work.

but, I do find outlining in the current OmniFocus noticeably slow and viscous – enough to impede the flow of thought, and enough drive me to do the outlining part in other apps, and then import – perfectly fine, but still ... a kind of transaction cost … and as for the speed of searching ...

I know we've been hearing for twenty years that performance is a distraction in software design – hardware's always speeding up and so forth – but the fact is that where thinking and planning are concerned, you really don't want to wait for the software, and if doing so is even marginally noticeable, the flow of awareness is distracted away from the project and towards the software – as if towards a pencil that needs sharpening, or a saw that has grown too blunt.

Of course there's a balance to be found – outlining in OmniFocus will never be as fast as in Vim, but then then the OmniFocus interface is more 'discoverable', and OF sits on a very solid and dependable database.

Nevertheless, I do wonder whether there's any scope for this aspect of OF 3 to be made just a little less ponderous or glutinous. I find, in practice, that I'm spending much more time 'living' and maintaining work notes in another app at the moment, not least because the outlining (and the searching) is simply so fast and unencumbering …


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