Today, I did a review of my projects in OmniFocus. And thought about if I really, really wanted to keep certain things in there. The key to any good productivity system is having trust in that it is working correctly. If I have things in the system that I'm not going to do, then a part of me is going to subconsciencely fight against it.
So, why are things in omnifocus in the first place?
Well, these were things that I wanted to do at some point in time and it has become very easy to add things to the inbox. Anything that I put into reminders1 or send directly from Safari or the mail drop.
When I attempt to get organized, I typically try to use omnifocus because a lot of people in my circle of influence use it when they are feeling overwhelmed. I like it because I'm somewhat familiar with it. Also, when I feel like going back to pencil and paper, I can print out everything to act as a starting point.
So, where am I going to put all this stuff than?
I've been thinking about it a lot recently. For a while, I was keeping a couple text files that would have information about different projects that I would like to do. I'd access them via nvAlt.
This allowed them to be saved in dropbox so that I could access them on different computers. The only problem is that a majority of the things that I was interested in starting would something that I found on the web (an article or how to).
I've thought about moving everything to evernote. It's a service that allows me to connect to my mac and also allows me to use windows as well. In fact, I've been using it more and more this year in order to help me track all the job applications that I submitted to the state government.
The reason that I'm not a fan of this is because I don't know what is going to happen with the future of the business. Although I have a premium membership, I don't think the new price is worth it for what I use it for. Nor do I think I can afford it the next time that renewal is up.
This leaves, me with Apple's Notes.app. It has really been making the rounds as far as praise from a lot of the people that I respect and has been fairly easy to use. The only problems that I'm worried about going forward with this the ability to add something to a pre-existing note when the list of notes starts to get longer. I like the fact that everything I put in it gets pushed to the server and is then on my device. I also like the idea of being able to have an easy way of sharing notes with my wife and look forward to more features in the future.
In conclusion, where am I going to put my notes.
Evernote allows me a place to sort things that I do not want to see in my review I think I'll be giving evernote another chance for being the place that I keep my maybe-someday list for projects. Although there is some uncertainty in the future of the service, it still works at this point and I don't imagine that it will be difficult to leave it in the future. I even went back and tried linking some notes together and I think I can come up with some really nice uses for that going forward.
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This actually works too well because sometimes, I put geo location and times with the reminders and this doesn't get translated when it makes the move to omnifocus. I think this is just a training issue of me applying that information later on. ↩