OmniFocus is a great place to store well-defined projects and actions in a highly-structured way but isn’t generally the best place to house things like project support materials, reference information, and that random (and brilliant) idea that you had while out walking the dog earlier today.
Notion can be a great complement to OmniFocus. It’s essentially a blank canvas that can be used to store a wide variety of information, everything from free-form notes from your brainstorming session to a detailed database of feature requests that you’ve received from your clients.
You can use Notion to house your personal information (e.g. your purpose in life and aspirations spanning years) and it can be used to share information and keep a team on track (e.g. as an internal wiki and as a place to share quarterly goals). The number of use cases is limited only by your imagination!
Both Evernote and Notion allow you to create notes and to store documents and image attachments. However, in my opinion, Evernote and Notion are strong at different things and using them together can really provide a “best of both worlds” experience. I have paid subscriptions to both Notion.
- Omnifocus in 2008. Evernote in 2010. Airtable in 2015. Notion even took notice and made me a Notion Pro for the LA area. My obsession with your productivity has been featured in publications including Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Barron's.
- Notion offers to-do list functionality, but it’s not as good as Todoist, OmniFocus or other to-do managers. That said, I don’t view this as a weakness for Notion. The fact that it can do all of these things in a relatively solid manner is an accomplishment.
It’s easy to reference anything you have stored in Notion from OmniFocus projects and actions. Simply choose “Copy Link…” from the “…” menu and paste the link into the note field of the related OmniFocus project or action.
Omnifocus And Notions
For example, if you have a page in Notion that contains ideas for your blog post, you could create a repeating “Review: blog ideas” action in OmniFocus that shows up on your radar every week. If you decide to go ahead and write one of these posts, you could create a “Write: blog post about…” to OmniFocus and include a link to the notes about this blog post that you’ve captured in Notion. OmniFocus prompts you to take action and Notion contains the information you need to move forward.