OmniFocus and Things come with beautiful and useful mobile applications for iPhone and iPad, but sometimes you just want to have more control over how tasks are added to their databases. Or maybe you can’t afford paying for multiple mobile versions of the same app and you just use the desktop application. Inside OmniFocus Learn more about how other OmniFocus users organize their workflows — how they do everything from running a freelance business, to managing meetings, to organizing grocery shopping. Read the Inside OmniFocus blog to learn about the great new features in OmniFocus 3! OmniFocus, GTD, and You Implementing the Getting Things Done® Methodology with OmniFocus “OmniFocus is a stellar tool for keeping track of outcomes and actions in the Mac environment. It supports simple but important practices for keeping your head clear, staying focused, and managing your commitments.” - David Allen. OmniFocus is a registered trademark and is used under license by the Omni Group. For more information on The Omni Group products the user may visit their website at the Omni Group. For OmniFocus, please visit the OmniFocus homepage. Getting Things Done & OmniFocus 2. Here’s the specific stuff. OmniFocus is the best way to implement GTD on Mac and iOS. Capturing in OmniFocus. The Inbox The Inbox is where capture happens. Anything can go here: the more you enter, the less you’ll forget.
With the official release of Things (and the expiration of the free betas), there has been ongoing chatter from those trying to decide which GTD app to use: Things or OmniFocus. Things last beta, and a promotional discount, are ending tomorrow, so I know many are trying to decide which way to go. Since I’ve been asked by several people, I thought I’d just post my thoughts for all to read.
Let me be candid…this is not a side by side comparison of the two products. I have dabbled a bit with Things but only have fleeting impressions of it. I have been wrapped around OmniFocus‘ finger since the beta. Before that I was using Kinkless GTD in OmniOutliner, the forerunner and inspiration for OmniFocus. So at best, I can offer you the reasons why Things hasn’t been able to pry me away from OmniFocus. And, these are the reasons I encourage you to give OmniFocus a long hard look too:
User Interface
No doubt, Things is pretty, and OmniFocus is, well, structured. When I first saw Things, I thought a lot of screen space was lost to eye candy. I know some of the layout can be collapsed down, but I still appreciate the function of the simple columns and indentations of tasks in OmniFocus. And while I don’t use them very much, the Perspectives in OmniFocus offer a lot of flexibility to, um, focus.
Quicksilver
I could not consider a GTD app that doesn’t have Quicksilver support available. When a task comes to mind, I want to shuffle it away (and into my inbox) with minimal effort and distraction. At least 5 times a day, I activate Quicksilver and fire a task into my inbox while reading, sitting in a meeting or working on another project. (You can read more about how I set this up here.) OmniFocus‘ quick entry feature is convenient, but Quicksilver is still more streamlined. As far as I know, Things does not have Quicksilver integration yet.
Power Use
I’m still learning features of OmniFocus after over a year of use. If you use, or are considering OmniFocus, take a look at Don McAlister’s (of ScreencastsOnline.com) two screencasts on OmniFocus — part one: basics and part two: advanced. I’ve learned even more features from these screencasts, some I have implemented and others I have not, but, I know the app still has plenty of room to grow with me.
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OmniGroup
I have 2-3 other OmniGroup apps and they make great stuff. I should disclose that I romanticize them a bit since their offices used to be right next to my favorite coffee shop in Seattle (and why they would move away from that java goodness…I have no idea). From my own experience, they are very responsive to customers via Twitter, email and in their support forums.
One Gripe
If I have one gripe, it is the OmniFocus iPhone app. It has great features, and I use it often, but not as much as I might. It is slow to load, and sync via mobileme is a slow process. I still don’t use OmniFocus for capturing tasks because of this (see my quicker solution). My wife syncs her iphone with OmniFocus via bonjour and it is a lot faster, but I don’t want to be limited to syncing over a local network.
I have several friends who love Things, and I don’t think it’s a mistake to go that route. Especially if cash is a deciding factor — Things (both Mac and iPhone versions) is half the price. But OmniFocus is the way to go for me…it has a learning curve at the beginning, but once you push through that, it is an app that will grow with you…and on you.
But I’d love to hear feedback from others too. My opinion is not the only one? Got other reasons to go with OmniFocus? Care to make a case for Things? Leave a comment below…
Latest PostsAfter years of bouncing between task managers, I always end up coming back to OmniFocus. In 2019, after finally reading Getting Things Done and having it really click with me, I don't see how I could use anything else in the near future; OmniFocus is just so damn amazing.
Today I want to take you on a quick tour of how I use OmniFocus to get my life in order.
Overview
![Omnifocus Things Omnifocus Things](/uploads/1/3/4/8/134819493/218046190.jpg)
I use OmniFocus for personal and work items, and the app has a few tools that make it much better at doing this than any other GTD app I've used (skip to 'Perspectives' for details on this). I also really like that the app gives me the ability to customize the look and feel to design the sort of task manager that I want, and hide most of the stuff I don't care about.
I'm also in love with how you can tell The Omni Group cares deeply about building top-notch iOS and macOS apps as each version of the app works extremely well.
This all adds up to an app that has enough control to let me structure my tasks well without adding friction which could discourage me from dumping all of my 'stuff' into it.
Tags and Projects
I could be more detailed here, but for me I really only use tags and ignore projects almost entirely. Tags, as I use them, are simply used to separate my work into the different parts of my life. I have the following tags set up:
- work
- personal
- birchtree
- freelance
- shopping
- reading
These 6 tags let me quickly filter my stuff into the major parts of my life. The first 4 are pretty normal, while 'shopping' is my shopping list and 'reading' is my reading list, something I've addressed at length already.
Perspectives
These tags are the main tool I use for my custom perspectives, and these perspectives are what really make OmniFocus work for me.
![Omnifocus Things Omnifocus Things](/uploads/1/3/4/8/134819493/737091596.png)
My usage: I only want to see my work tasks when I'm at work and my personal tasks when I'm at home. OmniFocus lets me do this with perspectives.
Without getting too into the details, perspectives let you set filters for what tasks you want to see in a view. You can save as many of these as you want, with the idea being that you can view similar tasks together. For me this means a 'Work' perspective that only shows me things I can do at work. When I get home, I no longer care about work, so I have a 'Home' perspective that only shows things I care about in my personal life. If I'm looking to work on this website, then I jump in the 'BirchTree' perspective and look at blog post and podcast ideas.
And because OmniFocus has lots of customization options, you get very deep control over how these perspectives display. You can have them in 3 different task layouts and have them sorted and filtered however you want. Here's what I have going on with my 'Work' perspective, for example:
And here's what I have for 'No Due Date' which is a perspective I use to look at items that have moved beyond my inbox but don't have a due date yet. I find tasks like this have a tendency to get lost, so reviewing this perspective every now and again is very useful.
Inbox
One of the key tenants of GTD is having an inbox that you can easily add things to and then triage at a later time. OmniFocus is very good at getting things into your inbox, whether it be on iOS or macOS. On iOS it simply has a share sheet item that can save pretty much anything from a file to a website. It's a little less universal on the Mac, but there is a Chrome extension, as well as a system share extension for Safari and other native Mac apps. Republr.
The Mac also has the benefit of being able to set up a keyboard shortcut (I use Cmd + Ctrl + Opt + Space) to bring up a quick task entry pop up from anywhere. I use this all the time for adding quick things that come up through the day, and this also makes it easy to tab through things like projects, tags, notes, and due dates to set all of that right away. You can see this in action here.
I think Todoist does a better job at letting you add tasks with more info (their natural language parsing is great) but OmniFocus more than gets the job done for me.
The Forecast View
In addition to the custom views allowed by perspectives, I really like the Forecast view in OmniFocus. This view simply shows you what's next. Forecast only cares about due dates, so this mixes projects and tags, but often this is a good view for me.
I really like that if I decide I am not going to get a task done today, I can just drag the task to another date on the calendar and it's immediately changed to that day. No other task manager I've used has made it so easy and tactile to move tasks around. And of course this works on iOS and macOS.
Conclusion
Omnifocus Tnt
This is by no means a complete explainer on how to use OmniFocus (for that the MacSparky Field Guide is a great resource), but I hope I've given you an idea of how I use OmniFocus.