This is either a feature request or a misunderstanding on my part. Any suggestions for mitigating the situation below, especially applescript based (I do not know applescript) would be very welcome.
I practice GTD and store project support materials and plans in my filesystem, one directory per project, in a directory called “project-support” in my home directory. Since I started using omnifocus, I’ve noticed that I am more willing to change the names of projects and organize them using omnifocus folders. Also, I’ve been using more “fine-grained” projects. This is, overall, a win for my GTD situation.
However, this is awkward and leads to a duplication of effort in my system for tracking project support materials. Use of omnifocus allows me to clarify project names and next actions, but the project support materials don’t follow along and I must update their filesystem storage location manually.
I should not have to do double-entry to maintain a project-support filesystem structure that exactly mirrors my omnifocus structure of projects and directories.
Either I’m missing out on existing functionality, or there should be a feature that allows omnifocus to create and manage a directory of project-support directories in accordance with the projects being tracked inside omnifocus. There should be an “open project support directory in finder” action available on each project. The directory structure should be human-readable.
Note that I’m not talking about bi-directional sync between the filesystem and the omnifocus outline. That would be madness and probably quite annoying to implement. All I want is one-way management of this directory structure from Omnifocus.
While I am wishing for elaborate features, I’d also like the following:
I do not store project plans inside Omnifocus, for me this would be a GTD “type error.” I manage project plans inside the relevant project-support directory in a plain-text file edited with emacs. A fantastic power-user feature on top of what I’ve outlined above would be an “open project plan” button/keyboard shortcut. The user could set the application of choice that they use to manage project plans (byword, emacs, vim, whatever) and a filename (mine would be plan.org). Omnifocus would go to the corresponding project-support directory and open the file named plan.org in emacs (with my settings), or create the relevant directory and a blank plan.org file if it did not exist.
Is this a stupid thing to want? I am also new to the mac. Is there another tool that would help me avoid this kind of double-entry nonsense and allow me to get to project support stuff quickly from omnifocus? I’m not unwilling to spend money.
The attachment system seems to not do what I want, because then I can’t get to stuff quickly from emacs…
Thoughts welcome. Cheers.