OmniFocus, It’s Not You, It’s me… Really

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Via Subtraction:

Not long ago I downloaded a new productivity application that recently emerged from a prolonged beta period. Finally, the 1.0 version had arrived, and I was eager to get my hands on it, play around with its features and see what it had to offer. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to use it.

To be fair, this application, which shall remain nameless, had clearly been designed with great attention to detail. Its interface is not unattractive and its fit and finish is commendable; you wouldn’t be remiss in regarding it as a completely professional product.

However. I kept staring at it, and kept clicking on interface widgets and pushing buttons, but the more I explored, the less likely it seemed that I would ever really master it. I’m sure that its workflow makes sense, that with some investment in time, a user could realize some significant benefits from it. I just had a hard time thinking that one of those users would be me.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Khoi Vinh may be writing about OmniFocus, but with the copious amount of Mac GTD apps out there, one can never be sure. Regardless, I’d have to say that this pretty much sums up my experience with OmniFocus. I desperately feel like I should love it and that it could make me more productive, but at the end of the day it feels like I’m doing more trying to keep my organizer organized than I am “Getting Things Done”.

I was excited about the eminent release of OmniFocus for iPhone, but I just kept feeling like there was something very broken in the whole OmniFocus process to begin with. I enjoy the level of granularity that OmniFocus allows, but at some point it feels a bit trivial to have to specify things like, for example, whether or not I’m going to work on my “actions” in my “project” sequentially or in parallel—or maybe this project is simply a “single action list” that “contains loose, unrelated items instead of actions aimed toward the completion of a goal.” I mean, really, does this look like an “‘At-a-glance’ Quick Reference Chart” to you?

When I realized that I was getting in to the habit of writing To-Do items down on 3x5 cards so that I could first “organize” them before going through the mentally tedious act of officially putting them into OmmniFocus, I knew I had to try something else. OmniFocus’ GTD implementation is amazingly near-perfect. And that’s probably why it’s hard for me to use. You see, when it comes to really Getting Things Done, whatever system you’re using needs to completely disappear until you need it, and then it needs to disappear again after you’ve gotten what you need from it and you’ve gone back to work. With OmniFocus, there was just too much to get distracted by. Bells. Whistles. Context Mode. Planning mode. Perspectives. Grouping. Sorting. Filtering. The list goes on and on. I spent a lot of time deliberating what project should contain what and just setting everything up so that I could work that it took a long time to finally just get to work. On top of this, OmniFocus feels clunky and very un-Mac-Like for some reason. Well, mostly for these reasons actually.

I decided to try Cultured Code’s supposedly less sophisticated Things for a prolonged period of time. Being used to OmniFocus, I was almost immediately turned off by Things’ lack of… stuff. I mean, compared to OmniFocus:

… Things is positively devoid of stuff to do:

But maybe that’s just exactly what I needed? Over the last few weeks, I’ve found that I actually use Things and it’s almost transparent. There is a lot of power behind Things’ decision to use tagging instead of complex nested hierarchies like OmniFocus. The app seems to allow you to use it very simply as a To-Do list holder, or more powerfully as a more GTD-style user with nested tags for contexts. I find myself wishing there was a tad bit more structure in the way that Things offers projects, but I’ve always been able to replicate that bit of “more structure” with a good balance of Projects or Areas and nested tagging.

I’ve found that since I actually use Things, it’s much more reliable than OmniFocus for me. Not in any technical manner, but reliable in the sense that I actually use it to manage what I have to get done. If you’re a bit flustered with your current system, you might want to learn about Things and the The Morning Scrub.

I’m still a bit on the fence, but Things is steadily gaining ground. The deal-breaker may come down to OmniFocus for iPhone versus Things for iPhone (which has yet to offer sync with the desktop version).

Update: Things for iPhone has finally been updated and now syncs with the desktop version so I’ve put together a quick look at OmniFocus versus Things.