[Rolf_schmolling]

Hello, some thoughts on archive-handling:

I am not satisfied with the handling of completed items. The strike-through makes no sense to me: it is hard to read. There definitly has to go more thinking into the archive-implementation, if one needs to keep the structure of project-orientated work for further reference. It makes much sense to keep notes, projects and stuff in one place (e.g. one piece of software). I am currently using Mori with the mGTD-plug-in and trying out OF in parallel.

One way to get a satisfactory archive-implementation would be proper export into (any) proper note-taking/organisational program (Mori, Journler, OO, DT etc.)

I have used Entourage in the past for this (while keeping my mail in Mail) but putting stuff in is just clumsy implemented. On the other hand: everything is kept in one place, might be linked together (tasks and notes/events) and can be searched. But still putting stuff in, linking etc. is implemented horribly.
So if OF is doing a better job here its on my list.

Any ideas/hints/experience?

Greetings,

Rolf

[BwanaZulia]

Personally, I don't want the archive anywhere but in OmniFocus. If I complete it I want to see it for awhile (sense of satisfaction) and than have it go away. I don't want it in my iCal after a sync and certainly don't want it on my Treo/iPhone.

I do, however, want it for history. All of it. Forever.

BZ

[curt.clifton]

Rolf,

You can change the style of completed items if the strike-through bothers you. Just select a completed item and choose Format -> Fonts -> Show Fonts. The font dialog has a drop-down box for changing the strike-through.

So far I like having my completed items and projects archive in OmniFocus. I'm not sure how I'll feel after I have a year's worth of completed items in there. I'm concerned both with the programming bogging down and with the completed projects becoming so numerous as to make finding things in them impractical. But if the program can be optimized to make current project management efficient, and if the filtering function is made more powerful (e.g., allowing limiting of date ranges and searching for strings within particular columns), then I could see keeping the archive in OF.

Cheers,

Curt

[BwanaZulia]

I know it is crazy, but I really just trust OmniGroup to make OmniFocus robust enough to take tens of thousands of projects, tasks, archives and still run great. It is a database after all with some nice caching so it should work.

OmniDudes!!! Can you tell us what you have been scaling it up to or what you expect the performance to be?

BZ

[curt.clifton]

Originally Posted by BwanaZulia

I know it is crazy, but I really just trust OmniGroup to make OmniFocus robust enough to take tens of thousands of projects, tasks, archives and still run great. It is a database after all with some nice caching so it should work.

Trusting OmniGroup to create robust software that runs great isn't crazy at all. They do it time after time!

[BwanaZulia]

Originally Posted by curt.clifton

Trusting OmniGroup to create robust software that runs great isn't crazy at all. They do it time after time!

Exactly. So Archive away!

BZ

[LizPf]

I know OF will take every action I can throw at it ... but I still want the option to archive off old stuff.

Think ... in 5 years, we'll have tens of thousands of items. things will slow down, and searches will become slooow.

Plus, I don't need active records of every load of laundry I've done, or every time I've uploaded my t-shirts to Google Base. Well, I might want to see them, but I don't need those in my working file.

I'd like a flexible system -- allow me to create a new database that I can populate with searched items of my choosing. So I can offload all my housework older than 6 months, routing business work and kidstuff after a year, and my conference presentations, never. Keep the OF filetype, so I can easily bring those items back into OF whenever I need.

But I don't think I'll need this until version 3.0, at least.

--Liz

[BwanaZulia]

I just don't think that 5/10/20 thousand is a large number. iTunes/iPhoto handle that.

Anyway in 3 years, I doubt I could do 10,000 things. That would be over 3,300 things a year or just 9 tasks done a day. Well, maybe that isn't so many but still, a person has to rest sometime!

BZ

[curt.clifton]

You might be surprised. My 2006 GTD log has over 3600 completed items in it! When you break projects down into single next actions, there are lots of actions.

[AmberV]

Yup, I go through around 4-5,000 tasks per year. Most of it is just junk that I don't need to record. Honestly, the project and notes pertaining to the project are of much greater use to me in the long term. I don't mind OF storing everything for a year, but at some point I'll want to flush everything out by type and keyword.

Here is what I would like to see: A way to export just projects by meta-data match "archive", to some useful format like XML, within a specified date range (400 to 200 days ago is my preferred range).

An alternative to this would be the ability to purge the archives with a similar filtering capability mentioned above. If I could wipe out everything that I did not select for archival, within a date range, that would make browsing it much more useful five years from now. Something like that could form the backbone for a useful reference system in the long term. If OF had a good method for indexing and browsing old records, I could see just keeping everything in one program. The only thing is, this is kind of all verging on Bloat. There are plenty of top-notch applications out there for archiving reference material, and efficiently recalling it later on. Why should OF attempt to match that when a simple export would do the trick?