[bmushrush]

Hi Everyone,

I'm on day 3 of my trial and really trying to make this work. I was thinking of implementing a system to track as much as possible... Home, Finance, Health, Hobbies, etc...

Part of that process was to store a link to where a scanned file is located. Expense receipts or other reference information for example. In the even it was not a soft copy, I was going to add a note as to where the hard copy is located...hopefully in a newly organized desk;).

Before I get too far down this road, I'd like to hear if anyone has tried this approach and if yes are you still doing it?

Is this over thinking the issue? Are there other way of approaching this issue?

Thanks,
Brad

[malisa]

Are you converting an existing system over to OF or are you 'starting from scratch'? Do you have a 'trusted' GTD system?

I ask because I found OF before I found GTD and crashed and burned twice by trying to get EVERYTHING into OF...all work stuff and all personal stuff. It was too much. I tried to get every aspect of my life into a repeating action where possible and they stacked up, got to voluminous to deal with and I gave up.

What finally worked for me was to work a simple paper GTD system for a while and slowly integrate pieces back into OF. I started with the things that I needed when out and about (iphone) and have added back more and more.

But that's just me. Others I'm sure were able to go whole hog and work out fine.

[bmushrush]

Thanks for the reply malisa.

I am starting from scratch. I have some work tasks in my work PC (Outlook) but nothing that's worth converting. I started out looking for a task management system and found GTD at the same time.

The scaled approach sounds logical. I currently do not have everything in OF. I'm starting off mainly with work and adding personal items as I go. My ideas around linking to and storing soft copies won't happen for several months. I want to determine first how long sync will happen as the db gets loaded.

Thanks Again!

[Gardener2]

I suspect that this would overload OmniFocus. When I started using OmniFocus, I tried to store a lot of extra material in it, mostly about hobbies - garden plants, sewing pattern numbers, perfumes of interest, books of interest, and so on. It didn't like it. :) It didn't crash, but it slowed down severely.

I've considered whether to make a feature request around this problem, but I'm not sure what to ask for - maybe lists on OmniFocus that don't have to be processed as tasks, and can therefore be longer with less slowdown? Essentially, OmniOutliner inside OmniFocus?

But meanwhile, I think that putting a lot of non-actionable items into OmniFocus is generally a mistake. If I were using it to manage expenses or bookkeeping, for example, I might flow receipts _through_ it, but I wouldn't keep them available for reference.

For example, I might use the quick entry to enter "Record Chili's, lunch, work expense, $14.79, MasterCard." with a context of "Quicken Entries". And then to work the action I'd enter that information into Quicken, and file the paper receipt in a general folder for receipts for the month or year. But then I'd let the OmniFocus action archive off, or even delete it.

Gardener

[malisa]

Originally Posted by Gardener2

I've considered whether to make a feature request around this problem, but I'm not sure what to ask for - maybe lists on OmniFocus that don't have to be processed as tasks, and can therefore be longer with less slowdown? Essentially, OmniOutliner inside OmniFocus?

But meanwhile, I think that putting a lot of non-actionable items into OmniFocus is generally a mistake.

Yeah, a lot of things that I put into OF the first times, I now keep in OO documents.

[Brian]

In general, I think including a link to documents (as opposed to embedding the document in the database) should have a negligible effect on sync. I don't do much file linking in my OmniFocus database, so I'll let folks better equipped to speak from experience respond. :-)

I did want to say that it's our intention that sync should work indefinitely, assuming that the tips posted at the start of this thread are put to use. (Regularly move completed stuff to the archive, for example, instead of letting years of completed actions accumulate.)

And, if folks do end up having trouble, we're always happy to help!