[kened]

i use omnioutliner for all sorts of things where you start off with a blank sheet of paper and jot down ideas at random then organise them later. omnioutliner makes this so much easier than trying to do it straight into a word processor, or textedit. some examples:
meeting agendas
shopping lists
packing lists (if you're into that sort of thing)
itinerary planning
outlining / structuring writing - anything from memos, through lecture notes, to essays, dissertations, plotting fiction
business presentations

- no limits really - basically anything where you would like to throw down ideas without having to worry about the final structure, and organising, editing and refining later.

the attraction of outliners is their flexibility, you don't have to commit to anything, in terms of structure, you plan, organise, edit, and compose on the fly. it's so much more fluid than a word processor.

i personally use omnifocus as a 'my memory' and organiser, along with my calendar - although OF evolved out of omnioutliner, and resembles it in many ways, i feel its purpose makes it quite a different animal. i have things in omnifocus like 'prepare documents for british council' with dates, and organisational sub-tasks and so on, but the preparation of the documents themselves i will do in OmniOutliner - and the linking facility between the two programmes is priceless here.