Switched from Things, thought i found what i needed…

..but i had to keep overlooking the fact that it didn’t do certain things i need it to do - most notably, multiple contexts/tags. I thought i had finally found my app… and i spent A LOT of time getting up to speed on the program… read many website, and the ‘creating flow with omnifocus’ book and they helped me get a grasp of the power that omnifocus has. It’s great… but there were still things from Things that i missed (ie. tags, drag and drop). Thought that they’ve got to be features coming soon.. but the more i researched.. the more i realized that they’d be a LONG time in coming…

I also found myself spending SO MUCH TIME TWEAKING the settings.. trying to find the right combination of settings to give me the optimal to-do list… and in restropect, i’d say TOO much time. I think i’d created dozens of custom perspectives. none of which i use anymore. frankly, I feel a bit foolish for having shelled out for premium now… the custom Perspective thing was a rabbit hole of tweaking that i could have done without.

I’ve since swtiched to 2Do… but here’s some things that OmniFocus DOES get right:

1. The Review tab… frankly, this took my GTD game to the next level… previously, i’d create tonnes of lists that were a graveyard of hopes and dreams… but the Review perspective for OmniFocus instilled in me the regular maintenance habits that i needed.

2. Sequential task… this was a revelation… the mixture of Sequential and Parallel projects really opened up my eyes to the possibilities of To-Do lists in OmniFocus. Thanks to Kourosh Dini’s “Creating Flow with OmniFocus” for opening my eyes.

3. Templates… leaving the house will never be the same now that i’ve moved on from OmniFocus… i had a ‘Leaving the House’ project that i’d duplicate and would keep me on point when packing up the family for a trip.

This is a solid app. Very powerful if you know exactly what you want… but too many buttons and settings if you don’t and you could easily get trapped in a rabbit-hole of “optimizing” if you aren’t careful.

wunder-where-my-app-went? about OmniFocus 2, v2.4.1