Task list aps: OmniFocus

December 16, 2008

In my last post I covered gootodo.com and why it’s simplicity was the key for me.  I’m going to cover OmniFocus, and discuss how and why I have switched to using it.  

I first heard of OmniFocus from Merlin Mann on the MacBreak Weekly podcast.  Mr. Mann was/is collaborating with the OmniGroup, and, as I am a big fan of his productivity writing over on 43folders.com, I was intrigued.  Mr. Mann is a believer in focused attention and freeing yourself from distractions.  I’ve found OmniFocus helps me immensely with that.  So let’s jump in.

I am not a proponent of having to watch videos in order to use a product; I’ve always felt if a video is necessary, perhaps the products is a wee bit too difficult.  But I spent some time on the OmniGroup’s web site and decided to invest the 10 minutes and watch the video. In this case, it was worth it ten times over.  So my first piece of advice is: Watch the tutorial, you’ll pick up rather quickly whether OmniFocus is for you.  I could tell that they philosophy for managing tasks was akin to mine and therefore was going to work well.  So for me, the video was a set of getting started shortcuts. 
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OmniFocus has two views or perspectives on how to look at your tasks.  You can look at them grouped by the projects they belong in, or by context.   What is context?  Context is all about where you are or what you are doing.  What this view allows me to do is create a task that can only be done at home and mark it as such.  Or create my list of things I need to buy and list the context as errands.  I didn’t think I would use this, but I find I use it all the time (along with the incredible iphone app which I won’t even discuss here today.  It is fantastic.)

The majority of my usage is on the project side.  The beauty of OmniFocus here is that it can be as simple or as complex as you like.  Want to use this tool like gootodo and just enter a line item description and move on?  Have at it, you can type a task description, hit enter, and you are at the next line item ready to enter your next task.  Want to have folders like work and personal, put projects inside those folders, set up tasks with start and due dates?  Knock yourself out, you can get VERY sophisticated here with the tool yet it is still easy to use.     

For example, one of my greatest faults in getting things done flares up whenever I have an event (phone call, meeting, errand) coming up in an hour or less.  I struggle determining what to do when I ‘only’ have 45 minutes before I have to stop work.  With OmniFocus however, using the duration field in the task, I have created a view for tasks that will take less than 30 minutes.  This forces me to work on something since I can see pretty clearly that I have the time.  OmniFocus has nailed the functionality of views and filters and the ‘out of the box’ views and ease of making new ones are the lynchpins for me.  I don’t waste my day in the tool working on my list instead of working on my work, but when I start and end my day, the views are critical to me.

Lastly, I made a big deal in gootodo about forwarding emails to gootodo.   OmniFocus gives me two ways to accomplish this task and more.  The first way is through a keyboard shortcut I can grab an email, snippet of text on the web, or anywhere on my desktop, and turn it into a task.  The second way is, on my Mac, OmniFocus allows me to create a mail rule.  I forward a mail item back to myself and the mail item goes into OmniFocus. 

I have read some people’s criticisms of OmniFocus stating that the up-front investment is too high, e.g. too much time to get set up and understand the tool.  I would argue that if you invest the time in watching the video, the additional time to get up and going may be 15 minutes to get the feel for it.  But the payoff is rather large and worth it. 

Decide what is right for you, then find tools focused on getting tasks out of your head, then getting you on your way.  

Posted in User Experience