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Hi all,

One the the biggest challenges I've had is keeping the stuff in my OF clean. I'm pretty good at capture, but until I also get really good at moving the appropriate stuff *out* of OF (for me this is probably not-active stuff like Maybe Someday, and captured things that turn out to be General Reference and Project Reference), there's too much stuff to wade through to quickly and effectively complete a weekly review.

I've played with the ideas of moving these things out into Devon (powerful but not for me), OmniOutliner, and even Freemind. At the moment OO is the front-runner but I wish the export worked better.

I recently had another idea but I can't tell whether it would work. Would it be possible to use an alternate .ofocus document, aside from the main document, where we could keep and review this peripheral stuff, and also from which to retrieve it? I can't see an Open command on the File menu, and I suspect that OF would only allow one OF document to be open at a time.

I think this could be pretty dangerous also, i.e. if I had an alternate .ofocus file open and OF thought it was my main one, and it attempted to sync with MobileMe. Has anyone tried anything like this?
 
You can have multiple OF documents open at once, and the obvious case is the Archive. OF "knows" that the main database is the one that lives at Library/Application Support/OmniFocus/OmniFocus.ofocus and won't accidentally sync something else (and there's a check performed at sync time to make sure the two databases being synced have sufficient common history that would likely catch it if somehow it did).

Just double-click a different OmniFocus file to open it (or use the commands in the File menu for the Archive). You can drag projects and actions back and forth.
 
Doh! Of course. For some reason I didn't think to try to open a .ofocus file in Finder.

The .ofocus files I have on my disk are currently the Archive, and dozens of backups. How would you go about creating a new, empty one? I could make a copy of a backup, open it, and then empty it.
 
Or use the File->Export command, and select OmniFocus document as the export type. Despite what the documentation suggests, when you export to one of the OmniFocus document types, you always get the entire contents of the database, not only what is shown in the current view as the other export types do.
 
Ah, I see. OK - good tip. Either way, I'll just need to delete everything from the copy to make a new one.

Looking forward to toying with this - and wondering how OF will behave differently on the second document - especially where perspectives are concerned. I'll post back here if I see any gems or curiosities - also if anyone knows of any gotchas on this road, by all means chime in... :-)

Cheers, and thanks again.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post

Just double-click a different OmniFocus file to open it (or use the commands in the File menu for the Archive). You can drag projects and actions back and forth.
But if I drag a project into a different OmniFocus file it does not copy the completed actions contained in the project. This feature? also occurs if I duplicate or cut and paste a project within the same OmniFocus file.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by fudster View Post
Ah, I see. OK - good tip. Either way, I'll just need to delete everything from the copy to make a new one.

Looking forward to toying with this - and wondering how OF will behave differently on the second document - especially where perspectives are concerned. I'll post back here if I see any gems or curiosities - also if anyone knows of any gotchas on this road, by all means chime in... :-)

Cheers, and thanks again.
I said that I would post back here if I saw anything notable - one thing I've noticed is that, when I drag a folder (say, a second or third-level folder) into the top level of the other ofocus document, OF creates the parent folder also and puts the folder there. A mild quirk, I just have to drag around a bit and delete the parent once it's empty.

Aside from this, I like how this works. I'm using this as a way to keep things clean in my main omnifocus document clean, so it contains only actionable stuff. I'm keeping Maybe Someday stuff in a separate document. Seems very promising.

The review cycle is supported, which will be nice for quickly whipping through the items looking for anything that's becoming more concrete or that should be deleted (DA recommends reviewing Maybe Someday regularly, I recall). The inbox works, complete with autocomplete in the Project dropdown... forming a nice conduit for Maybe Someday stuff from my main ofocus document (using a Maybe Someday "outbox") into the Maybe Someday document, where they can can be sorted and dispatched with ease.

I haven't run any of my helper applescripts in the Maybe Someday document yet, I want to review them all first and look for anything that's specific to the main document.
 
 


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