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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You will observe, and the keenest eyed already have, that I am looking quite far ahead in speaking of 'OmniFocus 3' …

A UI speed boost to OF2 would, of course, be even more timely and welcome :-)

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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.

[myfre]

totally agree.

i end up with a huge notepad file and break it down every few days. totally obnoxious to do this, and sloooow.

i've come to hate omnifocus because of this, and lack of tags, but i have so much invested with my huge files now, it's hard to switch.

i'd like to try 2do, but it doesn't allow nesting. if I could start over.... sigh!

[SerenusZeitblom]

For those quick write down things I use www.simplenote.com (has it' own app on iOS, nvALT on Mac, ResophNotes on Win, Flick note on Android). Fast and reliable for several years now.