I've posted about this before, but noticed this morning that I was wondering why I have been using OmniFocus less and less in my daily work.

Boils down to performance.

'Never do anything without writing it down first'. I find it productive to gather first thoughts about a project quite loosely, and then reorganise with a bit more rigour (often discovering problems, incoherences and better solutions while re-shaping the project outline). For this to work, it needs to be fast – the software shouldn't be slower than me.

But the OmniFocus design (quite understandably) offers rather more security than speed - every little outline indent and move is a transaction to be duly noted and shelved by scurrying virtual librarians who slow the whole thing down.

Fine, and, of course I can do the outlining in something faster, and then commit the outline to OF. Sometimes I do that – I've written a script to automate the commit. But more and more I find I'm simply skipping the OF part …

Training wheels to be used for a while and then left behind ? Not sure. OmniFocus is a really excellent piece of work. But it's just too slow to think in.