Using A Real Outliner

I’ve finally purchased and started to use a real outliner to organize my various projects. I made do with text documents and Word’s POS outliner for years, but after reading Scott Rosenberg’s thoughts on why outliners work for him, I started looking into them a bit more. When I bought OmniPlan recently, I decided to pony up the cash for OmniOutliner as well.

I’ve barely scratched its wealth of features, and I’m already asking myself why I haven’t done this before. Take, as one example, the “Writing Ideas” outline I started, a parallel to the text file I kept for years where I stored ideas for stories and their progress. Once I successfully pitched one to a publication, it got its own folder for all the material I collected, which I rarely organized beyond that.

But OmniOutliner allows you to add objects into an outline. So I have one idea I’m pondering, and my friend Sean mentioned an article that I thought might be relevant. I went to the site and dragged the URL into the outline. Now one of the list items under the story idea is the URL that I’ll want to review when I’m working on a draft. For a story that I’ve just started working on, I dragged in the text file where I typed up an interview. (I assume the program uses an alias to link to the file.) Had I had an audio file, I could have dragged that in.

As I move forward, I’ll have a one-glance view into all my writing projects and the tasks I have to do for each. When I go to write, I’ll have everything I need in one place.

Adios, Word’s outliner.