You can capture just the basics in plain text and tweak it - Book review For example, here’s a complex task I just copied from one of my projects: - Book review Review Atomic Habits Create book review post Schedule book review you don’t want to memorize the OmniFocus extensions to TaskPaper, that’s fine. When you copy a task out of OmniFocus, it has all the information you need to reconstruct the task in OmniFocus. You can quickly jot down a list of projects, tasks, and subtasks in TaskPaper using any app, then import it into OmniFocus. If you’re tracking a project in OmniFocus, you can copy the TaskPaper representation and send it to the other stakeholders. OmniFocus does many things well sharing project updates with others isn’t one of them.
OmniFocus (on macOS, at least) lets you create backups of your database which you can store offline. No matter how careful we are, sooner or later, we’re going to lose data. The next time you need to create a project from the template, just copy the TaskPaper snippet from your template file and paste into OmniFocus. One simple form of automation that anyone can use is to create a plain text file with templates for any projects you regularly use. Automation is a great way to get more done with less effort. To really boost your geek cred, Rosemary Orchard has a post on how she does this using git. Because you can copy and paste TaskPaper text between OmniFocus and a plain text file, you can easily move these ideas to and from external storage. While you can track your Someday/Maybe list in OmniFocus-I have for years-it does have its downsides. You might not do them ever you’re certainly not going to do them now. A Someday/Maybe list is a place to track ideas you have for things you want to do someday… maybe. Get your Someday/Maybe list out of OmniFocus.You can copy and paste between OmniFocus and any text app. You can use it as your primary task manager and be perfectly productive. There’s an app by the same name to make working with TaskPaper (the format) a more interactive experience.
It‘s a plain text file that can be opened in any text editor, but it has a lightweight syntax that gives specialized meaning to the status and attributes of your task list. (Fun fact: I write my blog posts in Markdown.) It still looks perfectly understandable in your favorite text editor. It can be turned into a markup language like HTML when you need to publish it. It’s a plain text format that can be opened, viewed, and edited in your favorite text editor. Word processors come and go, but you’ll always be able to open a plain text file, whether it’s ASCII or UTF8. Plain text, on the other hand, is future-proof. (It’s been a while since I’ve even had a 5¼-inch floppy drive.) If I did, I doubt I’d be able to open them. Nor do I have any of the files that I created with it. I don’t even remember the name of that app. For its pre-mouse day, it was state-of-the-art. By today’s standards, I was working with stone knives and bear skins. When I was in elementary school, I used a word processor for school assignments.