[LawDaddy]

This is a big deal for me as well. As you may have gathered from discussions throughout this forum, many of us are hoping for a little OmniOutliner functionality built-in to OF in the future. :) OO is an excellent tool for clipping together in one place the influx of info that comes at you during the day. I think many on this forum have OF and OO as a key part of their workflow. But like you, I prefer to work in one program whenever possible. A non-actionable 'info container' would be nice for each project.

In the mean time, I handle the gathering of non-actionable info in different ways depending on the situation. If the task is part of an existing project, I usually drop short notes into the notes field of the appropriate action item. For example, if I get a phone call and need to record something real quick, I pull up that project and drop a quick note into one of the pre-existing actions already there. I prefer to do this just to have one place where I capture short snippets.

For new projects, or if I know I am going to be taking longer notes (i.e., a conference call or a client meeting), I take the notes in OO and then attach it to a new action item and send it to my inbox for later processing or archiving at a future date. Again, I try as best I can to run everything through my OF inbox just to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. But this is still an unfortunate work-around as I end up creating 'dummy' actions to hold notes as you mention.

Most often though, my calls or meetings are the result of an initial email. If this is the case, then I send that email to my inbox, and attach any notes or other materials, such as pdfs. I have MANY pdfs in my OF database.

I then assign it to the proper project and context with no start or due date, and drag it to the bottom of the order in the project so it is never the next available action, but is visible in reviews. I add the text 'notes' to the beginning of the action's title; this is similar to what many do with 'waiting fors', where the title of a waiting action includes 'wf' to facilitate quick scanning.

Because the action's title also contains the title of the email, I know by looking at the action that it is really a place holder containing non-actionable info that was generated as a result of the subject of the email. Very often, these email-based notes become projects or actions themselves, and then I handle the associated info accordingly during my weekly reviews.

I use emails as 'info buckets' whenever possible; they are the electronic equivalent of a manila folder for me. This email info bucket process has really become part of my workflow. What is important to me is SPEED, using my kludge process I can Clip-O-Tron an email to the inbox, drag a file into the resulting action, and get it out of my head in seconds, while knowing that the info is captured and staged for a more thorough review at the appropriate time.

I realize that I am forcing OF to do a little more than it was designed for, but as I have discussed elsewhere on this forum, improving the capture stage and having one central place where info ends up has been the single biggest productivity enhancer for me with the GTD system.

Hope this helps...