OmniFocus for iPad has been submitted to the App Store! (Latest stats are that 85% of new apps are reviewed within 7 days.)

is it too much pressure to say that I am expecting OmniFocus for iPad to be a game changer in task managers?

You might be curious at the renewed interest in OmniFocus.  After all, aren’t we using Things around here?

Well, yes, we had been using Things.  But it just didn’t seem to be helping us get things done.  It is simple to use and has a nice interface.  But there seemed to be something missing.  Something that I couldn’t put my finder on, keeping us from using it as our main task tracking system.  So we used Things as a supplement to Bento and iCal.

As you can imagine, the results were quite unsatisfying.

We have been using OmniFocus for the better part of a month — for everything apart from scheduling.  I have to say I am quite pleased.

I have found the following features particularly useful:

• Deep folder hierarchies makes organizing tasks by topic and client much easier
• Different views lets me easily see what I have to do from many different angles (home in on one project or see everything due within the next few days)
• Action groups lets me make mini projects for a client engagement (the lack of nested projects was a major limitation of Things)
• Syncing across multiple computers has enabled us to work on the road much more effectively

When I first took a look at OmniFocus, I thought it was too powerful for what I needed.  But I think that was because I really didn’t understand what I needed.  In a busy firm, living the philosophy that “if I don’t record a task, it’s not getting done” really takes a powerful tool.

We have decided that tool is OmniFocus.  And so far it’s working out nicely.

A Little Background

In the beginning, there was OmniOutliner, which does pretty much what you would expect from the name. Despite being born without a single GTD bone in its body, OmniOutliner became a GTD application thanks to Ethan Schoonover. Kinkless GTD is a set of Applescripts that work with OmniOutliner Pro to implement task-management based on David Allen’s GTD methodology. Ethan and the folks at The Omni Group worked together to create OmniFocus, a purpose-built GTD application. Apparently the collaboration was a success because OmniFocus turned out great and Ethan is now at The Omni Group.

Organizing Tasks

OmniFocus is all about task management, so an important question to begin with is: how are tasks organized? Tasks, called actions in OmniFocus, can be related to a project (or single actions list), a context, or one of each. A project is a group of actions that are the steps necessary to achieve some end result or goal. The actions in a single-action list, on the other hand, might be related in some way, but they are not part of some greater undertaking. The OmniFocus manual defines a context as “the place or mode you need to be in to do a given task” (and I can’t think of a better way to describe it).

Projects

There are two kinds of projects: sequential and parallel. In a sequential project, one action must be completed before the next one is begun. In a parallel project, actions can be completed in any order. It sounds like a small difference, but it affects which tasks are available. Whether an action is available is just one of the many ways that OmniFocus allows you to slice and dice your action list (more on that later). Projects can also be given start, due, completed, and review dates.

A single actions list is like a project, but is less structured. A single actions list is just a bucket in which to throw actions that match some description (much like an “area” in Things). But whether your actions are in a project or a single actions list, the same options are available. It’s a little counterintuitive, but you can assign a due date and completed date to a single action list just like a project.

Most of the project features work well. Setting start, due, and completed dates is intuitive and useful. Like Things, which I reviewed previously, the repeat scheduling is a little wonky. A project set to repeat is created again as soon as it is completed, regardless of how often it is set to repeat. Until the repeat time comes around, the project are colored orange. The color will change to red once the actions are due. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the project to disappear from the sidebar or main window.

Contexts

Contexts were a little tough for me to grasp at first. I might be different than others, though, because I like my data and tools to be very well structured. In one of the early promotional videos, OmniFocus was touted as an application that is flexible – it can be as simple or complex as you need. That’s true, but I think contexts are most useful when they are given plenty of thought ahead of time.

My nightmare scenario is wanting to change the contexts I use as I go along. I might start simply, by using “home” and “work” contexts. If I later want to get more complicated, I might add an “errand” context. But what happens if I need to run an errand for work? The problem isn’t insurmountable because contexts can be hierarchical. OmniFocus also includes a few default contexts to get you thinking in the right direction.

Things, which I reviewed earlier, uses tags in much the same as OmniFocus uses contexts. I like tags because they don’t require as much planning. If I begin marking tasks with “home” and “work” tags, it is very easy to start adding “errand” tags where appropriate later. Some OmniFocus features wouldn’t work nearly as well with multiple contexts for an action, though. For example, actions can be synchronized with iCal based on which context they belong to. That kind of synchronization requires a one-to-one relationship between actions and contexts.

Actions: Not As Simple As They First Appear

When you first start entering actions, they seem pretty simple. Each action has places to enter a name and context and two greyed-out icons (the flag and note icons). Actions in the Inbox also have a place to enter a project name. New projects and contexts can be created while entering an action by pressing Command-Enter in either the project or context field after typing the desired name.

Actions become a lot more powerful through the use of notes. Notes are well-hidden, being accessed through the small note button on each action or by pressing Command-apostrophe. But OmniFocus drops a pretty major hint about the existence of notes by including a pair of introductory tasks with long notes when you run OmniFocus for the first time. Notes can hold rich text, including images, hyperlinks (which are active) and links to files.

Straddling the fence between a project and an action is a group. A project cannot have sub-projects, but groups nicely fill the void. A group appears in the action list just as an action – with a checkbox next to it. A group otherwise shares most of the features of projects, including: sequential and parallel modes; start due, and completed dates; and repeat scheduling.

Data Entry

There are several ways to get your data into OmniFocus. Of course, you can enter actions manually through the main window, but it’s not always convenient (or possible!) to switch away from what you’re doing and open OmniFocus. You can clip text from another application into the OmniFocus Inbox via the OmniFocus Clippings service. A clipping is created by highlighting text and pressing the shortcut (it defaults to Command-Shift-Option-Period) or choosing OmniFocus: Send to Inbox from the Services menu.

Actions can also be created via email. The basic idea is to send yourself specially crafted messages with the action information in the subject and body of your message. It seems like a lot of hassle to set up. But in theory it should run seamlessly without much intervention once OmniFocus and Mail are configured properly. Of course, I’ll soon be able to create actions from anywhere without email with my iPhone. So maybe I just lack sufficient motivation.

Sorting Through It All

Once your action list starts to grow, you will start to appreciate the tools OmniFocus provides to view and filter your tasks. OmniFocus has two modes – Planning and Context – that correspond to the two primary dimensions you use to classify your actions – projects and contexts. Clicking the View button on the tool bar brings up a row of sorting, grouping, and filter options.

A set of view options can be saved as a Perspective and recalled later. For example, you can achieve functionality similar to the Logbook in Things by creating a perspective for completed actions. Perspectives might seem like a minor feature, but they help push the complication of using OmniFocus into the background a little. Just set it and forget it!

The one word that seems to best describe the interface is uncluttered. The OmniFocus main window is quite clean and doesn’t overwhelm you with information. The flip side of that is that the OmniFocus main window can’t overwhelm you with information.

The Verdict

I can recommend OmniFocus without hesitation, but its not for everyone. Through the long beta process, OmniFocus seems to have added more and more features. It’s quite a sophisticated piece of software now. The result is that OmniFocus is not quite as accessible to casual users as Things. But it has plenty of features Things lacks. I’ll be checking out some other Mac GTD applications soon. But OmniFocus is the best pure GTD application I have seen so far.

Final Notes

I wanted to write a few words about Daylite because I get many visitors to this site looking for comparisons of OmniFocus and Daylite. Simply put, they are both great programs, but their strengths don’t really overlap. The power of Daylite is in the connections. Daylite isn’t a great contact manager, calendar, or task manager. Daylite is wonderful, though, in its ability to establish connections between everything that you track in Daylite. When did I last meet with a particular advisor? I can just look at the advisor’s contact in Daylite. The activity tab will tell me the date of my last appointment. The task list on Daylite is fairly basic, comprising a single customizable list view. A task can have notes, but extra clicks are required to view the note from the list view. Notes are, after all, just another kind of connection that Daylite keeps track of.

Unlike Daylite, OmniFocus only does one thing. That thing – task management – it does very well, though. OmniFocus has an extra dimension – context – from which to work. OmniFocus also has much more extensive sorting, grouping, and filtering options. When you have hundreds of tasks – some short-term, others long-term, some that are part of a discrete project, others that loosely related to a particular topic – you will enjoy having the power of software like OmniFocus to help plan your time.

There may be a place in a law firm (or other business) for both OmniFocus and Daylite because of their very different strengths. My wife uses Daylite for all of her primary business information tracking. Much of what she does, especially in areas of marketing, IT, and long-term planning, don’t really benefit from connections. That’s where OmniFocus finds a home.

A couple of weeks ago Marketcircle posted an article on their site called Getting Things Done with Daylite. It’s a nice tutorial on how to use the various tools Daylite provides as part of your workflow.

Introducing Things

When Cultured Code first announced Things I knew we were in for a treat. I have been using Xyle Scope, a web designer tool, for quite some time and have been very happy with it. There’s a lot to like about Things. I liked Things so much, in fact, that it made it onto my list of the 10 Most Beautiful Mac Applications (for Non-Geeks). Things is still beta software, so some things may change between now and the 1.0 release.

Things is a task manager. It’s for people who need to keep track of more than a few tasks at a time (which in my experience is basically everyone). The idea behind Things is to give you a single place to put all of your tasks and related information. Let’s take a look and see how well it works in practice.

The Basic Elements

You’ll spend most of your time in Things creating and manipulating tasks (called a To Do). All tasks have a title, and you can also include one or more tags, notes, and a due date. A task can also be set up to be repeating (more on that later). Entering a task is quite easy, and can be initiated by choosing the New task menu item, clicking on the New task button, or launching the Quick Entry window.

What sets Things apart from the other Mac GTD apps I have tried is its reliance on tags. A tag is a keyword, label, or other piece of information that is associated with the task. Things has a panel for managing your tags, but you can also create tags on the fly just by typing them into the tags input box for a task. Things tag entry also supports autocompletion and single-character shortcuts for faster tag entry. Tags aren’t just informational, they can also be used to focus on a particular subset of your tasks. At the top of the main window is a tag bar that allows you to select a tag, restricting your view to only those tasks with the matching tag. You can select more than one tag by holding down the Shift or Command key. Selecting multiple tags performs a logical “AND” operation (meaning all tags have to be present on a tag for it to be listed). I think an “OR” operation (meaning a task will be listed if any of the tags is present) would be more useful based on the time I spent with Things.

Tasks can be organized in two basic ways: projects and areas. A project represents a series of tasks necessary to reach some larger goal. An area represents a category of tasks or tasks that are related to an ongoing activity. Projects and areas differ in a number of ways. Projects are meant to be completed, so they have a box to check when the task is completed and can have a due date. Areas, on the other hand, are never completed. An area is simply a bucket for tasks that fit some description.

Sub-projects and sub-areas are not allowed right now. The sub-area limitation seems easy get around by using tags, but the lack of sub-projects seems like an oversight. An area can contain a project, but creating one is a little flaky. The only way to make a project in an area is to click the New project button at the bottom of the main window while an area is selected. Choosing the New Project menu item from the File menu or the sidebar menu (accessed by clicking the + button) will only create a top-level project.

Managing the Flow

Things has a number of bins (for lack of a better word) in the sidebar for organizing and working with your tasks. At the top is the Inbox, which serves as a place to create and hold tasks until you are show how to categorize them. Below the Inbox are the four Focus lists: Today, Next, Someday, and Scheduled. How these lists work will make the most sense if we start at the bottom.

The Scheduled list allows you to postpone a task until a particular date. The Someday list is like a permanent “snooze” button, providing a place for you to defer tasks indefinitely. The Next list is the big list of your uncompleted tasks. By default, only the next 3 tasks from each Project will be displayed (which makes sense because project tasks are generally intended to be performed sequentially). If Next is the big list, Today is the focused list. In Things, “Today” doesn’t really mean just “today.” The Today list holds tasks scheduled for today, overdue tasks, and any other tasks you decided to add to the list. It appears that a task will stay in the Today list until it is completed or deleted. The relationships between the lists are much more complicated than I have described here. Check out the Things wiki for more details.

Below the Focus lists are folders that contain your Projects and Areas. Right now selecting one of the folders doesn’t provide much information – just the name of each Project (or Area) and the number of tasks inside. Hopefully this feature will be beefed up by the 1.0 release.

At the bottom of the sidebar, next to the trash is the Logbook. When a task is completed, it will be archived to the Logbook. That gets the task out of the way while still keeping a record of it for future reference. I am a little puzzled by the fact that I can still edit tasks once they are in the Logbook. I would also like the Logbook to show the project or area where the task originated (possibly after the description of the task).

That’s Nice, But How Well Does It Work?

Things is structured around the GTD workflow. The Things sidebar has sections for collecting (the Inbox bucket) and organizing (the Today, Next, Someday, and Scheduled lists). The GTD workflow Process, Review and Do steps involve working in all of these sections. Things also attempts to incorporate the levels of focus concept by including projects and areas.

In my limited trial, I did not use the Inbox very much. I still haven’t gotten to the point where I collect everything I am going to do into one bucket. I am, however, very much project-oriented, and I like those projects to be organized. The Things project and areas features fit into my current workflow quite nicely.

I liked the ability to work at varying levels of focus. When I want to see what’s currently on my plate, I can work in the Focus section (either Today or Next). At the same time, I can easily look at the project as a whole – to add tasks, see what is coming up, or move things around a bit – by going to the Organize section.

Tags were a mixed bag. I liked the ability to assign tags to tasks because I have difficulty coming up with a single category that is sufficiently descriptive. That’s just too much pressure! On the other hand, I never found myself filtering tasks by tags because there wasn’t any need to. Tags would probably be more useful for someone who has hundreds of tasks. In my case, they served as useful reminders about the tasks but that was all.

Please Find Something to Complain About

I had to look hard, but I was able to find a few things I don’t like about Things. One is quite glaring, the others a little more subtle. The glaring problem is the lack of context menus. Just about anywhere I right-click (or control-click) I expect to see a menu appear. Not so in Things. Right-clicking on an element in the sidebar or a task in the main window does nothing. It fees very un-Maclike.

Speaking of un-Maclike features, I would like to see better drag-and-drop support. I understand that this might be an advanced feature, so I am not complaining about its absence so much as putting in a feature request. Dragging a URL to Things makes a new task with the URL as the description. It makes more sense to me that the URL would appear in the notes. And while we are putting URLs in the notes, imagine if Things made them clickable too! I would also like to be able to drag in (clickable) links to files on my own computer. Daylite already does this, and it’s a difficult feature to have to give up.

Another issue I had was with Repeating tasks. Setting a task to repeat every day literally creates a new task every day. If you’re not paying attention or go away for a few days you will find your Today list filling up with tasks – all identical. Since they are identical, I don’t see the need to create multiple copies. If you do want to allow for that possibility, at least make it an option that is turned off by default.

Finally, I would like to have an option to see my task notes more easily. Currently I have to double click on a task to enter edit mode to see the notes. An icon does appear on the task to remind me of the note. Getting to the note is far too difficult, though. Most of my notes are short – a maximum of one or two lines. Short notes could easily be shown in the entirety, with longer notes having a “more” link or button that would expand the entire text.

Final Notes

Overall, I enjoyed using Things. The interface is intuitive (context menus aside) and quite creative in how information is presented (a good example is how overdue tasks are displayed both in the sidebar and in the Today window). I think that with a few tweaks Things could become a truly great task management application.

More to Come

As I said at the outset, this review was based on a beta release of Things (version 0.9.1). I am sure I’ll have more to say (hopefully all good) when the release version arrives.

Enterprise Email: The iPhone will have built-in integration with Microsoft Exchange servers. Push email, contacts, and calendar events will be supported. Global address book support is also included. To me the big word from the announcement is push. I would like to be notified when I get a new email. Right now I have to get out the iPhone, unlock it, click on the Mail icon, and go to the email account I want to check. I’ll be interested to see how energy efficient the push email solution is. Push email won’t be useful if it means the iPhone’s battery can’t last the whole day.

The only drawback I see so far is that it requires the use of an Exchange server. As a Mac user, I wouldn’t be too happy about having to buy a Windows box to run Exchange just so I could get push email on my iPhone. What I would really like to see is push email on the iPhone powered by Leopard Server.

Security: The iPhone will receive a big security boost too. Most users won’t care about this, but their IT departments certainly will. One of the big fears about allowing corporate email access on the iPhone was what would happen if an iPhone is stolen. The iPhone’s remote wipe feature will allow the IT department to disable or delete at least part of the iPhone’s data (it’s unclear if the wipe feature will extend to everything on the phone or just the Exchange component).

Other security features include:

• Cisco IPsec VPN
• Two-factor authentication, certificates and identities
• Enterprise-class Wi-Fi with WPA2/802.1x
• Tools to enforce security policies

There’s a lot there to love, and it looks like Apple really listened well to the corporate IT folks.

The other set of announcements from Apple today relate to the iPhone SDK. The SDK (software development kit) is what allows people to write their own applications for the iPhone. Apart from games (something else to do on the train on the way to work), it looks like developers will be able to write some really cool applications. I won’t get into the details, but Apple has put together a pretty good set of tools for writing iPhone applications.

I am already excited about one application coming to the iPhone: OmniFocus. The ink was barely dry and the guys at The Omni Group were already announcing an iPhone application for OmniFocus. I like OmniFocus, but my big problem is that I don’t get to use my Mac for most of the day. My standard operating procedure has been to email myself reminders. I can create tasks in OmniFocus with emails, but I want real remote access to my task lists. That’s where an OmniFocus iPhone application comes in. I can’t wait!

Apple has a video of the event up on it’s website. You might get bored once they start talking about the SDK, but if you stick around you’ll get to see some cool video of Touch Fighter.