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.
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March 8th, 2009 - 10:25
First of all, I’m glad you’ve found a system that works well for you, even if it’s not OmniFocus! That is, after all, the whole point: to find the system that works best for you.
That said, I thought it might be helpful to respond to some of the specific concerns which you list as factors pushing you away from OmniFocus:
It sounds like you were running into long delays when rebuilding your database after a sync; the most recent release of OmniFocus for iPhone (from a few weeks ago) eliminates those rebuilds, making sync and load times much faster for most people.
Would it have helped to have a preference to not include attachments when capturing from an email message? (I assume that’s what you’re doing in your new Mail-to-Things workflow?)
This was a common source of confusion in OmniFocus 1.0, which we solved in OmniFocus 1.5 by adding a set of prebuilt perspectives to the default toolbar. Now, one click will show you all your tasks by project, context, due date, etc., so there’s much less opportunity to get lost in your view settings! (Tech support questions about this have dropped to basically zero since we shipped 1.5.)
I usually find that if I only want multiple tags on an tasks if I haven’t actually broken something down into discrete steps. In OmniFocus, any task can be broken down into subtasks, which makes it much easier to think about exactly how it will be accomplished in what context—and having a clear task with a single context makes it easier to actually do something when looking at your task list. (How do you break tasks into subtasks in Things?)
A simple way to indicate priority in OmniFocus is to drag your projects into the order you’d like to do them in. OmniFocus preserves this order whether viewing by project or context, so it’s a natural way to always see more important projects listed first. It also makes it less likely that you’ll have to go back through and reassign priorities to a bunch of projects when your work changes: you never have to reassign all your priorities to make room for a new project between two others, you can simply drag your projects into the right order.
This sounds exactly like the way I use top-level folders in OmniFocus: my top-level folders are “Omni”, “Family”, “Personal”, and “Community”, and with OmniFocus I can click on one of those folders to view only those tasks, or double-click to open a new window focused on just those tasks so I can view those tasks in other perspectives (e.g., a list of all my due items for Omni).
One advantage to using folders for this is that you can create subfolders: for example, my Omni folder has an “Product Development” subfolder which contains several projects, making it easy to spend some time focused on product development (as opposed to all the other things I do at Omni).
That sounds exactly like the way many people use flags in OmniFocus: you simply flag an item (Shift-Command-L) to indicate that it’s something you’d like to do today, then switch to the built-in Flagged perspective to see all your flagged items.
In OmniFocus 1.6, we’ve also added the option to view a single list of all items that are either Due or Flagged, so you don’t have to review your due items in a separate list.
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Again, let me reiterate that I’m glad you’ve found a system that works well for you! My goal isn’t to change your mind, I just want to make sure that you and your readers have more information available to you during the process of making up your mind.
Thanks for the detailed insight into your decision-making process!
March 8th, 2009 - 23:23
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful reply Ken. I do want to clarify that I do think OmniFocus is a very good product and has many very happy customers (and I wouldn’t consider myself unhappy in this case either). Your response is typical of the exceptional support that OmniGroup always provides which is why I seem to own just about every OmniGroup product.
A few additional responses:
On e-mail…Yes I think having attachments get included isn’t entirely helpful. Generally all I want is the text of the e-mail, if I’m going to work on the task in depth I’ll click on the link I have back to the original email and open the attachment(s) from there. Again, I think it creates a lot of issues when customers have to roll their own solutions for this kind of thing. It would be far more convenient of the product just provided a solution for this. In this specific case I think it must be a very common requirement.
1) The issue I described with perspectives is an error in my description. The issue was with using “Focus”. I inadvertently focused on a particular folder causing all my other Folders to disappear. Not having intended to Focus and not using that feature normally it was quite confusing. So in re-creating the problem I see that the Window label does say “Focusing on” which does provide the clue I apparently missed the first time around. One suggestion would be to have the menu on a folder allow the user to “Unfocus”. When my “Work” folder is in Focus I can still select “Focus” from the menu which doesn’t make it intuitive that that folder is already in Focus. Overall not a big issue when you understand what is happening. (I’ll update the post to clarify this).
Thanks again Ken for the very thoughtful response. I’m sure a lot of OmniFocus users will read this and be able to improve their use OF from it.
March 9th, 2009 - 01:28
By the way, if you select a portion of the email message before using the Clippings keyboard shortcut, OmniFocus will just archive that little bit of the message. But we’ll also work on adding a preference to automatically filter out attachments, and we’re also working on adding some UI to make it easier to find large attachments (so you can get rid of them).
Hmm… As it turns out, OmniFocus already does this: when focused, the menu on a folder adds the option to “Show All Projects”. But I guess that’s not that obvious, so we’ll keep thinking about other ways to make it more obvious when you’ve focused on something (without making the indicator so distracting that it ruins the purpose of focusing!). (Right now, as you mentioned, the most visible indicator is that the window’s title bar changes.)
Thanks again for taking the time to consider these issues in such detail!
January 4th, 2010 - 22:49
Que palabras adecuadas… Fenomenal, la idea brillante
July 3rd, 2010 - 22:12
Ken,
Your explanations of how to prioritize in OmniFocus just saved me. I was getting really frustrated by not being able to filter my tasks to just see the most important ones, but I created a few general folders and VOILA! I seriously feel a huge sense of relief. I don’t want to switch to Things, and move my ENTIRE database over. Now I don’t have to.
July 25th, 2010 - 10:55
No offense, but it appears most of your problems result from simply not understanding how to use omnifocus correctly, despite your long time use of it. Some of these topics have already been covered:
- I never lose site of tasks or projects. I use to, but not since it’s dead simple to get back to seeing everything.
- folders can be areas. no different than things areas.
If you like simple and easy, things is great.
But omnifocus is far more powerful, far more flexible, and the fact that things doesn’t have ota syncing is ridiculous.
August 6th, 2010 - 17:16
No offense taken. Back when the article was written the information on “how” to use it was much less obvious than it may be now. The biggest issues I had were with usability are what I consider bugs.
The OTA syncing is great and its a fatal problem for Things I think. But using it on the old iPhone was useless when it took 2 minutes to load (then crashed). I’m probably going to give it another shot now that iOS4 is out and multi-tasking is a real option.