Mac Law Students

Omni Outliner is, as the name implies, an outliner program. It is an excellent tool for taking notes, making lists, and organizing chunks of information. If you give OmniOutliner a spin and you decide you like it, you’ll probably really appreciate the Pro version. OmniOutliner Pro adds advanced styling options, document sectioning capability, audio annotations, dynamic addition of information from other applications, and template creation. You also need the Pro version in order to run Kinkless GTD (aka kGTD), a set of Applescripts that turn Omni Outliner Pro into a flexible, capable time management tool.

Apple thoughtfully bundles it with PowerBooks and MacBook Pro laptops, so you may already have Omni Outliner without even knowing it. You can also download trial versions of both Omni Outliner and Omni Outliner Pro before you buy. Student pricing for OmniOutliner Pro is pretty good: $24.95 to upgrade from Omni Outliner, and $49.95 for a straight purchase. I use OO Pro literally every day; aside from my email client and Web browser there is no more important program on my laptop.

Ethan J. A. Schoonover created kGTD, and makes it available for free. As he is quick to point out, Kinkless is “in serious beta,” meaning that there are known bugs. That said, I’ve been using it for several months and Kinkless has never crashed OO Pro or created any other problems.

OmniOutliner Pro

In my first semester at law school, I fiddled around with OO Pro until I came up with a system that worked for me. Because notetaking and information organization are such individualized persuits, I doubt that my setup is ideal for anyone but myself. Still, seeing how I use it may spur you to try using OO Pro in ways you hadn’t thought of before.

Keeping track of casebook reading can be an annoyance. Some professors stick like Krazy Glue to the syllabus, while others get behind then attempt to catch up a the end of the semester. Still others provide you with lengthy, rambling multi-page documents that go into great detail about each assignment, without telling you when each of these assignments is due.

Enter OmniOutliner. At the beginning of the semester, I take all of the syllabi provided by my professors, and I create a week-by-week outline covering the entire semester. I then copy and paste the assigment information from each class into the appropriate date slot. Because OO lets me toggle open one or more days at a time, I can view as much or as little of my reading schedule as I want. This is really handy on Sunday, when I’m figuring out what the following week will be like.

“Ah, yes, Einstein! That’s all well and good, but what do you do when that finely-tuned reading schedule of yours changes?” you might say. Here’s where the drag and drop goodness comes into play. I simply grab an assignment and move it from whatever date it is in, to a new date. On occasion this means moving several assignments forward, but it can be done very rapidly in OO. In a perfect world, I would create an AppleScript that would automatically bump assignments forward, but I’m too lazy.

You can download an example semester syllabus file in OmniOutliner Pro format from the Templates & Examples page.

The true raison d’être for OmniOutliner is, as far as I’m concerned, note taking. I keep all of my casebriefs and class notes in one OmniOutliner document for each class. This helps me as exam time approaches, because I already have my class notes and casebriefs in the same outline. OmniOutliner Pro gives me the ability to segment my notes by topic, while still managing them all in the same document. This is incredibly useful, because it provides context. It also makes it very easy to add or modify notes from last Wednesday’s class when my Torts professor (invariably) refers back to a prior case when discussing today’s reading.

It may seem like using one massive outline for each class could rapidly create hairballs. It takes some getting used to, but OmniOutliner’s nesting capabilities and drag and drop repositioning make it easy to sort notes in a clean hierarchical fashion. Later, when it’s time to put together that “class outline” that everyone is always obsessing over, you can simply make a copy of your existing class outline (I always like to have a copy of the orginal, because I’m paranoid), then start trimming it down for use as your study outline.

You can do some nifty formatting with OmniOutliner Pro. For example, you can give alternating lines of text a light background color to make it easier to read. You can assign styles to different levels in your note hierarchy, so for example, top level topics are shown as 14 pt. bold Verdana in red, while second level items display in 12 pt. Times Roman black. However, styles can be a bit tricky to apply. Even though I’ve been using OO Pro for a long time, I still get confused occasionally when I’m trying to apply a blanket style change to a document. Because you can apply styles to a given level in the hierarchy and to a specific line of text, it is not always apparent why text is styled in a certain fashion. It could be me, but other OO Pro users I’ve talked to have expressed the same confusion.

I don’t use voice annotation or many of the other extra features included in the Pro version of OmniOutliner, but I am quite fond of the Sections drawer, because it helps me zoom in on a particular chunk of my outline and jump from section to section effortlessly. OmniOutliner exports to plain text (.txt), HTML, RTF (handy for MS Word users), and even Keynote. If you ever have to cover for a classmate who is absent for a class session, this can be rather handy.

Kinkless GTD

Kinkless presents itself as an OmniOutliner Pro document with several pre-defined Sections and a set of handy buttons that allow the document to act more like an application. Kinkless is also called kGTD because it is based on the Getting Things Done productivity methodology created by David Allen. If you have ever used a FranklinCovey planner or something similar, you’re familiar with basic time management principles. Getting Things Done is an approach that emphasizes gathering all of the info you have about what you have to do, and slicing that info into small, manageable chunks. Kinkless GTD is a place for you to put those chunks, sorted by project (i.e., “Get Accepted to SCU”) and by context (”At the House,” “At the Library”).

I’ve been using kGTD for a few months, and the most striking thing I’ve discovered is that the system works best when you truly focus on getting your tasks divided into really small slices. For example, one day I realized I had to have the contents of a VHS recording of an oral argument transferred to DVD. I made one Action delivering the VHS tape to the AV folks on campus, the next Action sending a follow up email two days later, and the following Action picking up the DVD.

This sounds like overkill, but in practice it isn’t. If I were to simply create one Action called “Get VHS tape transferred to DVD,” that Action would be staring me in the face for three or four days, and each time I looked at it, I would have to think about where I was in the process, and what I had to do next. Small actions are like chewing your food thoroughly. It takes a bit more effort, but it’s worth it in the long run.

I find that when I have everything written down, the various tasks I have to accomplish are less burdensome and stressful. Kinkless is certainly not the only way to manage tasks, but I find it very intuitive and flexible. It feels like it is working for me, rather than the other way around. I also appreciate that Kinkless focuses on one thing. It is a to do list tool. Rather than attempt to be a calendaring app, it syncs with iCal. Perfect!

Kinkless is one of those applications that is difficult to explain. It’s better to see it in action. Thankfully, the meticulous Mr. Schoonover has created a spiffy introductory video that gives you the lowdown in just over ten minutes.

Other Resources

Because of its excellent support for AppleScript, you can create scripts that exchange information with other programs (that’s how the Kinkless scripts sync with iCal, for example). You can find a small but interesting collection of AppleScripts for OmniOutliner here.

If you are interested in Mac-centric personal productivity, take a look at 43 Folders. You can also waste a lot of time learning how to be productive at Lifehacker.