Randomly happened upon this old 43Folders post on appending text via QuickSilver. Thinking about how fast that is for certain types of lists (books for library/amazon — and right, I know I haven’t put the library first in practice, but that’s exactly why I wrote it that way!; wines – but that seems like a worthless endeavor after a while, right?; restaurants in other cities – is that really a “travel” task?; random ideas for gifts, websites, and similar things – text files all cross-link; I should put them in DVT (Pro Office FTW!) if it became useful to track them — indeed, the whole lot of text files can probably be added to DVT as part of an indexed folder.

This little tidbit will get added to my workflow post (forthcoming!) for sure!

It’s not quite zero-effort, but it’s more lightweight than my current system of adding these bits as individual items in OmniFocus and then consolidating them randomly. Not only do I create more work than is probably warranted by a reference link, the list of references isn’t a task. David Allen is already preparing to roll over in his grave. There is a burden to seeing that I still have nearly 2500 entries in OF (no lie!), even after pulling out well over 100 partly written blog posts. 

Much of that material is reference stuff that got added to my Outlook task list when that was my tool of choice (platform-dependent: I bought OmniFocus very soon after getting my Macbook Air). The workflow simplicity of email something and then drag it to the task list to keep track of it (hosted Exchange is one version of a backup plan!) was commendable. But I definitely stored lots of things in the task list that didn’t belong there.

To preview things a bit, the workflow post covers the shifts in my tools, process, and thinking (deliberately ordered that way) after switching to the Mac created an opportunity for deliberate planning — path dependency no more!