Apple Briefs

I did something I hadn’t planned on doing for a while – write an article about another application from The Omni Group.¹ I have good reason, though. Over the weekend, The Omni Group announced a public beta² of a task-management application called OmniFocus.

I have been using OmniFocus for several months now as part of the private beta program and have been quite impressed. My calendar needs are pretty simple, and iCal serves those needs well. The iCal To Do feature, though, hasn’t worked for keeping track of my tasks. The only way to categorize a task in iCal is to assign it to a calendar. That becomes quite cumbersome as the number of calendars grows because the primary way to distinguish one calendar from another is by color.

OmniFocus was inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done. OmniFocus isn’t the first Mac GTD application. But for me, at least, OmniFocus is the best of the bunch. I have listed the other Mac GTD applications that I know of at the end of article. If you know of any that aren’t listed, let me know and I will add them.

OmniFocus has the tools to make GTD work. OmniFocus lets me capture whatever I am thinking about as a task. I can annotate the task by writing notes or attaching file, so I can get rid of the email or piece of paper that got me thinking about the task. If I know right away that the task will be a big task, I can create the task as a separate project. If I discover later that a task is more complicated than I first thought, I can promote it from a task to a project at that time. In this way, OmniFocus lets me break down my tasks into discrete steps, so I always know what I have to do next.

Probably the best way to understand OmniFocus and how it can help you get organized is to see it in use. The Omni Group has a 15-minute video on their website about how to use OmniFocus and what it can do.

OmniFocus won’t replace your calendar application. But, if your task-management system involves pieces of physical paper or more than one application, you might want to take a look at OmniFocus.

¹ I promise this will be the last one for a while. The Omni Group has several other applications, but I only use OmniWeb and OmniFocus regularly.

² Beta software is pre-release software that the company allows people to use so the software can be tested as much as possible. It also happens to be great marketing by allowing people to use the software free for many months.