Getting Productive with Omni Software: Exploiting OmniFocus, OmniOutliner and OmniPlan by Gallagher William

Author:Gallagher, William [Gallagher, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780993402548
Publisher: Dark Ride
Published: 2016-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

Part II

OmniOutliner

11

Case study: This Book in OmniOutliner

There is a chance that this is the first book to ever include and examine its own outline but if so, it's not because it is a unique little snowflake in the history of the world's publishing industry. It'll be because examining an outline is dead boring. An outline is a tool used to get you to a finished product and if the product is finished, an outline is at best a historical document, at worst an inaccurate contents page or most often just a way of reminding you what you should've done. Except here.

Here it's actually relevant because this book was planned out in OmniOutliner much more than most the other titles I've written and, unusually, it stayed in this outlining software. I didn't create any To Do tasks about it in OmniFocus, I just wrote every day. I didn't project manage it in OmniPlan because I knew there were just two facts to keep in mind: that I was I the only person working on it and that there was a deadline.

Yet while I ignored OmniPlan and used OmniFocus for every other task I had going on, I slapped down the idea in OmniOutliner and then I spent a preposterous amount of time juggling it around in that app. So as an example of what OmniOutliner is good for, I now have preposterous levels of experience.

Follow. This book was originally borne of two thoughts. The first was that these Omni apps are so useful to me that I want them to be useful to you. But the second, coming in maybe half a pixel behind the first, was that I have already written a lot about all of these applications. As I eventually found out, I've written something around 30,000 words about them across some 20 articles or so.

Some of those were originally published on a productivity website of mine called The Blank Screen and others were on MacNN.com. There was surely a way to take that material and pop it into a single book that would prove worthwhile writing and reading. That would be worth doing, would be of use.

So step number 1 was that I wrote down the following in OmniOutliner:

1) Intro

2) OmniFocus

3) OmniOutliner

4) OmniPlan

5) OmniGraffle

Then under those headings I collected the titles and website URLs of each article I've previously written about these apps. This was straight and pure collation, no thinking or analysis required. The job is to gather up all of the information, the job is specifically to not make any judgements about what's worth gathering, just do it. Only, you don't work like that.

As I copied the text out into OmniOutliner I was of course reading and analysing it all. Unfortunately, that reading told me three extremely important things:

• None of the features really said what any of these Omni apps do

• Not one of them covered how they work together

• There was only the briefest mention of Pro vs Standard versions

• I've gone on too

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.