GTD Mac Showdown – OmniFocus vs. Things
OmniFocus vs. Things
Having been a long-term and obsessive OmniFocus user (since the early Alpha builds) I thought it was time to look at some of the alternatives out there. I didn't really have time to review all the choices out there, but so I decided to do an evaluation of Things from Cultured Code. There are plenty of exhaustive reviews of these products and the world probably doesn't need another one, so I'm going to describe just the key issues that drove me to ultimately replace OmniFocus with Things.
Like I said I've been an OF user since before it was officially released and purchased its iPhone app the day it was released. OF has been a good friend, but it hasn't been without some trouble. The iPhone app has never worked reliably for me. I admit that I have a very large database and my workflow creates many of the tasks from e-mail. OF currently includes email text and attachments in its database which causes significant bloat (according to their technical support). This results in painful loading time on the iPhone and in my case it simply crashes almost all the time, either on start-up or after using it for 30-60 seconds. After repeated attempts to resolve the issue I stopped using the iPhone app.
As I began to use Things I was excited by the chance to have a working iPhone app again. The Things iPhone app provides a lot of the capability of the desktop and is very easy to use. I like it, but with it lacks two features the OF iPhone app has. OF has a wide variety of methods for syncing the iPhone and desktop databases. The one I use is using .Mac/iDisk so that my databases sync no matter where I am as long as I'm on a network. Things syncs over a wireless network when your iPhone and desktop software are on the same LAN. This works very well, but really requires you remember to sync them before you go mobile. So while I like the Things iPhone app, it still needs more work. This wasn't a big deterrent for me in switching since I had adapted to not having a reliable iPhone app anyway. The other feature the OF has is the ability to tag locations to your tasks and use the GPS to find tasks that can be completed in your vicinity. This sounds like a neat feature and I know people who use it, but again without the app working for me is theoretical. I would love it if Things added this though.
The things that really drove me to switch are:
(1) A beautiful UI. The Things UI is simple and clean. OF is feature-laden, but a bit clunky. There are tons of modes and settings, none of which I find profoundly useful. One day I accidentally, without realizing it, set my system into a "Perspective" which caused many of my projects to simply disappear. I was convinced by entire DB had become corrupted. There are many clunky things like this in OF, that the simplicity of Things simply avoids.
(2) Tags. I really love the idea of Tags in Things. It's a general idea that you can Tag projects and you can Tag tasks and then filter the next actions you are looking at by Tag. Tags can be used to implement Contexts and it also allows multiple Tags to be assigned to a single task. I love this because I can easily implement the idea of "Waiting For". When I delegate a task out I simply add the Waiting For task to it, which still preserves the other tags assigned to it. In OF a task is in only one Context so I add it to Waiting For context, but lose track of which context it was originally in.
It also allows implementation of priority. OF has a Flag capability that is binary, it's flagged or its not. I used this to indicate priority, but invariably too many tasks get Flagged and it begins to lose its meaning without very careful management. The Tag capability lets you implement whatever scheme you like. This is a HUGE benefit of Things for me.
(3) Areas. Things lets you group projects into Areas. This is quite flexible and lets you group tasks into "Work", "Home", "Father", "Husband", "Finance". Then you can easily look at all your projects in that context. This feature is completely optional, but I find it incredibly useful. In OF previously I managed the same thing with SubProjects, but I found this quite cumbersome and grouping a large number of projects and making sure they stayed organized was fairly painful.
(4) Today. This might be my very favorite feature of all in Things. There is a category called "Today" and you can simply take any projects in your "Next" list and designate them as "Today". I love this for implementing the "Most Important Tasks" idea (See Review of Power of Less). First thing in the morning I select 3-4 tasks that really must be done that done and add them to the Today category. I begin working on those first and try to make sure they are done by the end of the day. There is no good way that I know of in OmniFocus to implement this.
Conclusion and how to integrate with e-mail.
These are the major things that compelled me to switch to Things. I am so happy I did. Before I finish this I want to describe how I integrate with e-mail. A very large number of tasks that come my way come via e-mail, but in my opinion neither OF or Things really handles this correctly out of the box. I find this a shocking oversight. To be fair they have both implemented a service that allows clipping and this can be scripted, but as far as I know you can only tell it to insert the selected item. Normally when doing e-mail you want to add the e-mail to your inbox or directly to a project and then Move the e-mail out of your Inbox into some archive or reference folder (I call mine Reference).
So I am using Apple Mail.app for mail. When I want to convert an email into a task hit the `-t key sequence and Mail Act-On will then invoke a script that launches the Quick Entry feature populated with a meaningful subject and a link to the e-mail in the Notes section. Then when I want to do the task I can simply click on the link, the original e-mail is there which I can then reply to, forward, or whatever I need to do. By default the task is entered placed in the 'Inbox' which I find to be the best place as I can more thoughtfully go back and assign it to a project, add tags, etc. later.
When I first started evaluating Things I wasn't sure if it was going to be possible because Things lacks a proper Apple Script interface, unlike OF which has an extremely powerful one. Fortunately I found that Niclas Nilsson has developed and published a very creative solution that does exactly what I was looking for. This mimics exactly how I want to use it and how was doing things with OmniFocus. If you want to use Things I strongly encourage you to review his posting here.
Quick workouts – the question?
joyful and fun exercise
In light of the last post on saving time I wanted to explore the topic of efficient exercise. Experts say that you should exercise daily and recent research suggests that even moderate daily exercise may not be enough.So how much exercise do we really need? In my own mind I usually figure that I will need to exercise 30 - 60 minutes in order get into reasonably good shape? And let me be clear I'm not exercising much these days - and to be honest, trying to find 3-7 extra hours a week to really exercise seems daunting and keeps me from really getting started again - since I'll only run out of time to do it right anyway.
If we use our 1 year calculation that is between 6 and 16 days in a year just spent exercise, realistically more if you include time driving to a gym or the extra showers and changing one might do. So it's definitely a topic worth exploring if we want to use time efficiently
Let's pretend for the sake of discussion - and this is an invitation for discussion, that you can get significant gains from short periods of the "right" exercise. But what is the right exercise? This is what I'm looking for input from readers.
The question
If you budgeted 15 minutes a day for exercise, what would your exercise routine include each day?
(The goal should be to be well rounded and build strength, flexibility, and endurance.)
I plan to take all the input and feedback and build it into a personal workout plan to try out personally and document the results.
Please comment...
The power of minutes…
Time is not infinite
I often hear people say, that something will only take a minute of their time...
What's the real value of a mintue? If time is money, then a minute saved is a minute earned. Let's take a moment and think about where those minutes go and how they add up.
If you take 2 minutes in the morning and 2 minutes in the evening to brush your teeth, in a week that is 28 minutes. In a year it is over 24 hours. That is an entire 24 hours - one day - in a year BRUSHING YOUR TEETH! 1 out of every 365 minutes you spend in a year is spent brushing your teeth.
So stop brushing. No not really, but where could you find 4 minutes a day and gain back a day of your life every year? If you found enough of them, could you find a whole week or even a whole month in your life? Let's look at a few examples:
30 minute TV show once per week = 26 hours (1+ days)
60 minute TV show once per week = 52 hours (2.1 days)
10 minute shower everyday = 60 hours (2.5 days)
60 minutes per day on Facebook = 52 hours
20 minutes to go out and get lunch at the office = 83 hours (3.5 days)
I often like to ask myself: "Is this an activity I wouldn't mind doing for the period of time continuously?" Do I like a TV show enough to watch it for 26 straight hours? For me, there are very TV shows that would meet that criteria, but there
So if you could eliminate 1 60 minute TV show per week you would get back 2.1 days. Remember that is 60 waking hours. If you sleep 8 hours, then this is equivalent to almost 4 waking days. If you TiVo the show and skip the ads a 60 minute show contains 16 minutes of commercials, so even if you watch the show you could still save about a half a day still watch your favorite show.
Reducing a daily shower from 10 minutes to 5 minutes will save you almost 30 hours in the course of a year.
Remember saving just 4 minutes a day will buy you 24 waking hours each year.
What time saving tips have you found that can shave a few minutes here and there?
Book Review – The Power of Less
The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential...in Business and in Life by Leo Babauta
[amazonify]1401309704:right[/amazonify]
Leo Babauta is the author of the Zen Habits blog which is now one of the Top 100 blogs in the world. His blog is based on his inspiring story of changing his life beginning with quitting smoking, becoming a vegetarian, running marathons, turning his financial life around, creating a blog with 100,000 readers. The theme of his blog if you haven't read it yet is simplicity, doing less, enjoying more by being absorbed in the moment. It's a simple, focused message that permeates every area of life if you adopt if fully.
Getting Important Things Done
In my last post I described my current GTD setup using OmniFocus. This works really well, but doesn't always make it easy to keep the important and unimportant activities sorted out and enables confusion between activity and achievement. A couple things I find really useful for making sure I'm focusing on the important things are:
- Identifying 3 major goals for each day. I try to focus on completing these before even reading e-mail or getting caught up in the emergencies of the day. This is a great way to focus on what is really important each day. I also love the idea of avoiding e-mail until some of the important things get done. There will always be more e-mail to read and answer. The trouble with e-mail is that when you reply, people just write back, leading to more e-mail and if you always feel the need to read and reply quickly you can easily get stuck in an endless cycle of communication that may or may not be leading to results on the most important things.
- In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey describes 4 Quadrants for classifying your activities based on Urgency and Importance. The ideal scenario is to have activities focused in Quadrant II, that is those that are both urgent and important. By classifying the items on your activities list into 4 Quadrants , it becomes quite easy to focus on the most important things. In Omnifocus this functionality is lacking, but I use the Flag feature to identify Quadrant I activities that are both important and urgent. The Weekly review forces thinking each week into Quadrant II. By using the tip above of focusing on 3 strategic and important items each day it is fairly easy to ensure that the important activities are being address. This is of course true if one isn't over-committing. That will be a future topic.
| URGENT | NOT URGENT | |
| IMPORTANT |
I
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II
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| NOT IMPORTANT |
III
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IV
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