getting things done with omni outliner

first off, if you're not already hip to "personal productivity guru" david allen and his magnum opus, getting things done - i highly, highly suggest getting with the program and reading his book - or at the very least, skimming the free primer on his time management schema by visiting the very helpful 43 folders website.

if you are, wisely, already using the gtd system - then you're aware of the brilliance of contextualized "next action" lists to help simplify your life. omni group's omni outliner pro app is simply the best tool i have found for creating flexible, organic, easy-to-manage next action lists.

having tried a few permutations of regular text documents (textedit, word, etc) for this purpose - i am enamored of omni outliner because of the elegance of its "drop down" design. just like the nesting folder list views in the mac osx finder, omni outliner lets you drill down your projects, contexts and actions to the microscopic level - and then with just a few mouse clicks, collapse it all down to a couple lines of text to get the "bird's eye view" of the landscape. that feature alone is worth the price of admission (which is nominal - USD $40 for the standard license i think). the ability to collapse a massively detailed outline with a couple of clicks is truly life changing, and encourages "outcome based thinking" a la tony robbins. ("time of your life" and "getting things done" - now THERE'S a killer combo, btw.)

along with the collapsed/expanded views, omni outliner gives you some nifty features for tracking progress of a project - custom comment fields, inline notetaking, attachments/document storage, and of course the ubiquitous "checkbox". great app, and KILLS word (let alone textedit) as a project management/tasklist system.

to sum up: gtd = good. gtd + omni outliner = freakin' awesome. if you are already on the gtd track, you really owe it to yourself to give omni outliner a serious look.