Saw a post from Gabe migrating from Omnifocus to text files. I thought Omnifocus was a bit of an overkill perhaps productivity porn, but boy I was wrong! This article REDEFINES the boundaries of productivity porn.
Just so you get the idea of the depth and the level this goes, take a peak at some of the quotes:
But there are many artifacts that are still quite functional in a plain text list. Start dates and due dates are still valuable but much more limited without alarms. Contexts are possible, but I’ve all but abandoned them (much more on this later). I end up reviewing tasks far more in plain text. There’s no easy way to defer a task, and keeping it around actually makes everything harder, so I try to remove individual items as quickly as possible. Plain text imposes a penalty on procrastination.
While we are big fans of reviewing on AlphaEfficiency, I can only imagine the pain of running a platform that doesn’t have reminders and ways to move redundant things away from our view. Sometimes some things are just too much. The whole goal of owning a task manager is so you can get the tools out of the way, instead of the tools getting in your way. I’ll take a break here, and showcase more redundancy:
You will want to decide if you need an Inbox project in each file or a separate Inbox file. I’ve chosen to use both. I have an explicit Inbox document for general miscellany or when I just don’t want to take the time to think about where something goes.
Sure, it’s possible to run your platform in text files, yet so is doing the same thing on paper. Yet the fact that you can certainly doesn’t mean you should. When we choose task managers, or any other productivity tool, we do it for the reason of removing friction. Downgrading from dedicated task manager to text files feels like moving from a car to a horse.
Think that the hardest part of running your life in text files is getting into habit of not having your projects and tags visually represented, but instead you need to manage the searches manually.
At the end of the day the author himself concludes;
As I’d already concluded with OmniFocus, time dependent tasks are best left to a separate alert system. Appointments go in a calendar, tasks go in the task manager and alarms go in an alarm service.
