I have a follow-up post that discusses this and how to use the OmniFocus: Send to Inbox function to accomplish the same thing.

Hope this helps!

-Adam

Have a problem: the link to the message in the OmniFocus-Action does not work. (link is something like that: message://20080305034151.75524110247@mail.cinergy.ch)

and if I click it, Mail should launch and open the message. but there is an Error: No Application found (and a the Mail Logo is shown in the Error window)

Can you fix this? Or can you publish the code (or make the file editable)? Maby I can fix it myself…

thanks, simon

http://scriptbuilders.net/

By-the-way, Chris, thank you very much for your comments! I know exactly what you are talking about. Apple Mail, OmniFocus and Finder are three separate applications and (unless you weld these together under something like crm4mac) there is no apparent means of insuring referencial integrity between your projects. On the other hand, Entourage makes it such a pain-in-the-butt to manipulate project folders, that these are probably best used for tracking your super-projects (or, as David calls them, your “areas of responsibility”).

One of the things I do, that helps me focus things a bit, is to name all my projects using a hybrid camel notation (all you programmers should know what I’m talking about). The idea is to add a sort-of hierarchy to your projects by building a string of folder names that get progressively more specific as you go. For example:

fa_halloween
fa_momsBirthday
me_blog_articles
me_blog_site
me_gtd_entourage

In this case, “fa” = family, “me” = me (you get the idea). Also, notice that “me_blog” has two sub-projects (”_articles” and “_site”).

I promise I’ll have more on all this soon. In the meantime, I’ll be releasing my first cocoa plug-in for Entourage next week. I’m pretty excited about it (this one took some doing)… but I’ll let you guys read about it all then!

Best,
-Adam

I am an alpha tester for OmniFocus, and I love it. However, I’m coming up against some limits to its usefulness, and considering moving (back) to Entourage, which I had tried long ago, and didn’t stick with for a few reasons.

Here’s the trouble: While OmniFocus rocks in terms of its treatment of GTD concepts, it’s not a complete solution for all of my digital artifacts (yet?). For example:

1) I have OmniFocus acting as the repository for all tasks, organized by project. I have approximately 100 projects in total.

2) I have a ~/Desktop/Projects folder with subfolders that mirror the project list in OmniFocus, so that I have a place to store all of my different files, OmniOutliner lists, etc associated with my given projects

3) I have a hierarchy of mailboxes in Mail.app that (you guessed it) mirrors exactly the hierarchy of folders and projects in OmniOutliner, so that I have a place to store project-specific email.

4) I keep a journal using MacJournal, and have begun to create, as necessary, subjournals in accordance with each of my projects in OmniFocus so that I can easily keep free-form notes and journal entries associated with my projects.

As you can see, this is a nightmare trying to keep all these artifacts in sync, review them in a cohesive manner, etc. I’m doing it because this level of organization is so critical to me, but the price I’m paying is MUCH higher than I’d like. Unfortunately, OmniFocus just doesn’t go far enough. I want my GTD app to be able to be my ‘one stop shopping’ for project management, period.

Add all this up and it brings us back to Entourage. I left Entourage after giving it a serious multi-month try a couple years ago. It didn’t feel like a mac app, had the multi-screen project wizard abomination (yes, Adam, I saw your post on this and the apple script that fixes it, thank you), and there were other issues as well. But for all it’s warts, its the only app out there (that I’ve seen) that has this comprehensive all-in-one kind of functionality. Moreover, it’s the only app out there with this kind of functionality that has a usable calendar (that can sync with my iphone and Zimbra - very important).

With all that said, I’d like to ask you Adam - given that you’re someone who has apparently power-used Entourage from a GTD point of view, AND you’re someone who has experience with OmniFocus, what do you recommend here? Can you see my plight with the multiple parallel project hierarchies across different apps? How the heck do you manage this? And is it going to be anything less than heartache for me to move backward to Entourage after having used the most excellent OmniFocus?

If the guys out there at OMNI are reading this, please take heed. Power GTDers need even more functionality out of OmniFocus. I know you guys are trying to keep it lightweight (and I understand some mail integration is on the way), but right now it’s just not enough! And yes, I’ll post something to the alpha users’ feedback list about this too…

Thanks all!

Best,
-Adam