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GTD Mac Showdown Round 2

Almost 2 years ago I posted an article comparing OmniFocus and and Things as tools for implementing a GTD system on the Mac.  Since that time I've received a number of comments on the blog asking an update on that or complaining that my original arguments are out of date.  Although I'd been happily using my Uberfocus system (variant of AutoFocus) for almost a year I decided it was time to take a step back and see if something really had changed.  I committed to try each tool for 30 days and this article is a result of that investigation.

I'm going to just lay this out in chronological order of how my experiment unfolded.  I ended up in a different place than I started, but not for any of the reasons I expected.

So first I decided to compare Omnifocus and Things at the same time.  I normally keep two separate systems running (context), one for my main job and one for everything else: family, personal, financial, businesses I own, etc.    I put my main job into Omnifocus and everything else into Things.  I felt this would let me get the best side by side comparison of the two tools.

If you have not read my earlier writing on Autofocus and Uberfocus I think that these system address a major gap in my understanding of GTD.  GTD is wonderful at capture, organizing, and planning, but the execution portion I think is underspecified.  The "focus" approaches are all about how to execute through the tasks currently on your plate.  In my opinion any tool that can't support an efficient way to execute my Uberfocus system is useless to me.  My needs are not unlike anyone using the AutoFocus systems, but if you aren't into that then your criteria may be a bit different.

First Omnifocus.  Without re-writing my earlier review let me say that I think very little has really changed with the tool and that most of my earlier comments are still valid.  Omnifocus really stands out in its ability to synchronize across multiple devices and integrate with email.  It's very hard to beat it for that.  Where I think it is still in the stone ages is that it really has no solid notion of how to order your work, but its loyalty to GTD does not make that a surprise.  In other words I don't want the sequence in which tasks shows up to be forced upon me.  The only place you can move the sequence of Projects and Actions is in planning mode.

In short I used it for a week, tried everything to get it to behave the way I wanted.  Ended up actually using planning mode for everything but even that is incredibly clunky and inefficient.  I had to abandon it because it was seriously impacting my work.

Next up: Things.  Again not much has really changed with Things since my last review.  I am much happier with my integration with email this time around and it now has short cut keys for moving where tasks are in the list.  A fundamental action in Uberfocus is to work on something until you can't work on it anymore, and then you want to essentially re-write it at the end of the list to be continued later.  This makes it very clear which actions are progressing and which are not.  Things makes this very easy.  The only complaint I had is that I really want new items to show up at the end of the list and not the top and I wasn't able to get this to work.

Replacing OminFocus...

I had committed to 30 days and barely made it to 7 with OmniFocus.  So I decided to broaden my net and look for new GTD applications that might be promising.  After some research "The Hit List" looks like the most promising one that might have met my needs.  I really like the Hit List.

The UI is my favorite of all the tools reviewed here.  It has great key strokes for shortcuts and it's foldering system seems more powerful than Things', but cleaner than OmniFocus.  It has a very nice system for setting up recurring tasks (like "Write status report").

It's email integration (or at least the one I came up with) is the least powerful of the 3, forcing everything into the Inbox.  I prefer to just dump most of those into a single list I call Next Actions and I wasn't able to quickly work out a way to do that.  It also seems to struggle with Task ordering and actions seem to not be where I want them.   It does easily let me move tasks to the end of the list, but again new tasks don't always go where I want them.

Summary

This has been a really brief summary of my experiment with the 3 tools and you can probably tell I'm not completely happy with all of them.  I was completely committed to continuing to use Thing and Hit List for the 30 days to give them both a fair shot.  As the 30-days came close to expiring I had planned to switch my personal work Hit List and just keep using them.  Intellectually I really prefer the idea of having an electronic system and I do love that my tasks that were generated from emails let me get back to the original email with a single click.

All through the 30 days I had this pervasive sense that my life was unraveling and I could not stay on top of things.  I really did not connect that feeling with the tool evaluation.  It's true that it's an incredibly busy quarter for me with many very large projects in my life all nearing completion, working with new business partners and colleagues, etc.  One day I finally asked the question, "Could this pervasive sense of losing control have anything to do with having changed my system."  I know that at home for example, I had everything captured and in my system, but I just found that I wasn't taking the time to work on my actions when I was at home.  At work I knew what the projects were, I had everything captured as well, but I was beginning to miss deadlines which had not happened in a very long time.  Coincidence?

I'm going to address how I resolved this issue in my next post.  In quick summary on these 3 tools here is my basic rating:

- Hit List - If electronic tools work well for you, I think it's the best of the 3.  More powerful than Things, simpler and far more beautiful than Omnifocus.  If you can live without good device syncing.  I would highly recommend it.  You can get it here...

- Things - In theory I like it, but I've just found that I seem to avoid using it.  It's device syncing is weaker than OF, so I can't really think of any reason to use it over Hit List.

- Omnifocus - I just really dislike it and have never found myself really successful using it.  I love how easy it is to capture things with it, but unfortunately things don't get done when I use it.

I'm sure there are many differing opinions on these tools and how to use them.  Those are mine.  I hope they are useful to you.

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