[mitchellzone]

I would love nothing better than to use OF for managing my entire GTD process. However, I've been frustrated by one thing in particular: How do I keep files or emails organized that are related to a project I'm working on, or even a single task?

Two examples of where this is a problem:

1. I'm processing my email, and have a bunch of emails including attachments (e.g. budgets or invoices) all related to a particular project. I'd like to use the email clipping ability to suck them into OF and just nuke them from my email inbox. But I can't do this--they contain attachments, so if I just capture the tasks in OF using the clippy-thing and delete the emails, I've now lost the attachments. To avoid this, I need to keep an email folder (I have a folder named "-- Projects --" that I keep all these in) that contains emails with attachments in them so they're not lost. A related issue is that I might have a ton of reference emails related to a project that I might need to reply to as part of the project, etc. These are much better kept in a chronological record in an email folder--they're not really individual actions.
2. I'm just doing a project on my Mac that happens to involve reading a bunch of reference files, and doing occasional work with them. Some of them I could just attach to actions, which I realize could just make a link, but this means I must maintain a project folder external to OF in addition to the project within OF. There's not any explicit linkage between these, so each time I want to work on the project I have to open up both the OF project and the project folder in Finder.

So, the issue is that, even though I have OF to manage all my "stuff", I still need to keep some things in email, and some things in a Finder folder, so for a given project I have crap spread all over the place, potentially out of sync, and it's often not very convenient.

It would be nice if OF had some way of providing a "portal" into related email folders or Finder folders, so I could view everything in a single place when I went to focus on a project.

I guess it would help me a lot of OF did not simply link to email-based attachments and instead imported them right into the OF database. That would solve half my problem.

Thoughts from anyone else?