I have been using OF for a few years and I love it, but it isn’t making me more productive because it’s clogged with all my huge amounts of reference materials, notes that are not tied to tasks and which I never get around to filing since filing them is low-priority-- so I never see my actual tasks. This seems to be a common problem.
I’m wondering if i need a separate place to keep my notes. I considered Devonthink but I didn’t like the interface, and I couldn’t have easily imported my thousands of OF notes into it, and finally it was a real dealbreaker for me that I couldn’t email notes directly into the inbox, a feature i just love in OF. I looked at Centrallo and others, but they just don’t feel good, and I don’t want anything that stores stuff just on the cloud–I lost years worth of notes in Evernote in the cloud once, and I need to feel that my info is on my device.
I love how OF syncs, and I’ve seen no other interface that compares to OF in beauty and simplicity–I just “get” OF. I’ve even considered buying a second copy of OF just for notes, but I don’t want to pay for that, and I think it might get confusing with the syncing. I’ve also thought that maybe I should just dive back into OF itself more deeply and just figure out how to MAKE IT WORK for both my notes and my tasks. Maybe I could figure out how to use the contexts more effectively, creating one huge Reference context that would be super-simple to put things in, blocking it from view, and then searching that context when needed instead of bothering to create multiple tasks and actions within it. Does anyone do that? Or maybe I should commit to becoming more disciplined about doing regular Reviews…though frankly I’m exhausted at the thought of having to file and add contexts and projects to all the notes I’ve been dumping in there. I want to think about urgent tasks, not about random low-priority notes!
I feel like i’m at a crossroads and would love ideas. I hope Omni will make a note-taking app someday that’s designed to supplement OF. But meanwhile, does anyone actually use OF to store large numbers of notes, and still manage to make it work cleanly for task management also? If so, please share how you make it work. Or maybe OO 5 could solve my problem? I thought OO was more for outlining projects than for storing notes, but If anyone uses OO successfully for notes, please share how you do this.
Bottom line: I need a very quick, simple way to store notes that makes it easy to search and retrieve the notes later. I need to be able to email notes to it and I want it to work offline the way OF does. I would love to do this within OF or another Omni product if at all possible because I love the Omni interface and it just keeps things simpler to stick with one product, and if I don’t have to pay more that is good too. But I need to do it in a way is easy and quick and at the same time won’t clog up my tasks.
I feel I am at a crossroads and would love any thoughts.
thanks!