Posted on August 20th, 2005 by Kevin Dangoor

OmniOutliner is a great organizational tool

I’ve been reading 43 Folders for a while, and I really dig the whole GTD thing. Until today, I was keeping my next action lists in TextMate. But then I read Keith Robinson’s How I learned to stop worrying and love my schedule and it’s companion How I Schedule Actions and Tasks.

Spreadsheets are a great generic tool for keeping track of lists of things, adding stuff up and the like. (I hear there are some potential applications in financial fields as well, but I’ll believe it when I see it.) I’ve been looking for a decent Mac OS X native spreadsheet for a while, and just couldn’t come up with anything short of splurging on Microsoft Office.

Keith’s post highlights a workflow where tasks are kept in OmniOutliner and then scheduled in iCal. What Keith’s posting showed me was that you can have columns in OmniOutliner, and those columns can be tallied. It’s like a hierarchical spreadsheet. I’ve only just gotten started with it, but it’s a beautiful package.

When reading the articles, even though I loved what i saw about OmniOutliner, I could see a problem that I would have with the iCal part of the workflow. Keith alludes to it as well: it’s hard to rearrange big blobs of scheduled stuff if something comes up and forces its way into the middle of your schedule.

My thought: OmniOutliner to the rescue! I put estimates on my tasks the same way that Keith does. Then I create a “Schedule” outline with a top-level entry for each day and drag tasks from my various todo outlines onto each day. Most tasks don’t have to be done at a specific time of the day, so this works well. Just drop the tasks on the day and make sure the total of the tasks doesn’t go over the total time available in the day.

Outliners are naturally very good at selecting many nodes and moving them around to appropriate places. If something squeezes into my schedule, I just use this natural facility of the outliner to move things from one day to the next.

The only thing left is to figure out how to make appointments that do have a fixed time make it into iCal, which does alarms and all that good stuff. Maybe it’s not such a big deal, if I’m always just working off of the outline.

OmniGroup managed to get a bit of extra money out of me today, because OmniOutliner met these organization needs I had and it just happens that I have some diagrams that need making, so the bundle with OmniGraffle, etc. turned out to be a good deal. This is particularly true given that OmniGraffle is about to have a price increase.

7 Responses to “OmniOutliner is a great organizational tool”

Ian Landsman on August 20th, 2005 11:30 pm:

I’ve been using both Omni Outliner and Graffle for years and they’re fantastic. I basically managed the entire production of HelpSpot with it. Graffle is what Visio always should have been.

tazzzzz on August 21st, 2005 3:08 pm:

To Visio’s credit, I don’t remember seeing anything else like it when it was first introduced. It’s been a few years since I’ve played with Visio, so I don’t know what the current versions are like.

OmniGraffle looks great from the little bit I spent playing with it yesterday.

Jon Trainer on August 22nd, 2005 12:54 pm:

I just began using both Omni Outliner and Graffle this past month. I had read many good reviews about both tools but had trouble justifying the expense. I tried the demos and discovered that the cost was reasonable given the productivity improvements they both enabled.

Eric H. Jung on August 22nd, 2005 3:12 pm:

You said, “I’ve been looking for a decent Mac OS X native spreadsheet for a while, and just couldn’t come up with anything short of splurging on Microsoft Office.”

What about OpenOffice.org’s Calc? It’s the best competitor to Office out there, works with Mac, Windows, Linux, reads/writes Office binary file formats, and is open source!

tazzzzz on August 22nd, 2005 3:25 pm:

I have Open Office and have used it a fair bit here and there. It’s not exactly “Mac OS X native”. Open Office on the Mac runs under X windows, which is ugly as sin and annoying. NeoOffice/J uses Java to provide a much more native environment for Open Office. However, if you add the load of a Java GUI to that of Open Office, you’ve got a big hog of an app.

Apps with Cocoa interfaces on the Mac really shine. They’re light and fast. Even a XUL/JS app under Deer Park is swifter, I think, than what you get from the heavy beast that is NeoOffice/J.

This is an especially important consideration given that whatever tool I use for keeping myself organized is likely to be running *all the time*. OmniOutliner has been unobtrusive.

(Don’t get me wrong, Open Office is a great package and a viable MS Office competitor… but the Mac support is weak, and would be much weaker if it weren’t for the work of NeoOffice/J).

Eric H. Jung on August 23rd, 2005 1:57 am:

I’m sorry to hear that about Open Office on Mac. I don’t have a Mac so wouldn’t know about its appearance. AFAIK it uses GTK on linux (what I have), but whatever it graphics library it’s using it’s definitely not X.

Random Pedant on August 7th, 2008 9:03 pm:

I’m only posting this for posterity, but in reply to Eric above, I’d like to point out that GTK in 99% of its implementations is in fact displaying via the X Window System. It’s just nicer (even back in 2005 when this thread was started…) than the old xlib, athena, and motif widget sets out there.