I too wish that areas where accessible in the iPhone app but I’m not sure I miss the sequential vs. Context in Things is handled through tags. More on that in another post.Īreas in Things is less about context and more closely tied to GTD’s areas of responsibilities (work, family responsibilities, home management, etc.) and come into play mostly during the weekly/ monthly reviews. This all ties into a meme that I’ve been pondering for a few years. But in the end, I find I am an OmniFocus kind of guy after all–maybe not to the surprise of those who know me. I knew that heading into Things, but I expected to catch the zen of Things’ fantastic design and use that to overcome the missing features. I need to stop myself if I continue to compare features, OmniFocus will win over and over again. Duration of a to-do is implemented as a tag? Really? (The Things developers promise to rectify both of these limitations.) I use both of these features. Oh, and in Things items in projects can’t be set to repeat. In Things, projects just contain to-do items. For example, OmniFocus has a notion of projects with to-do items that can be completed sequentially, in parallel, or that are just catch-alls for items. There is no way to assign to-do items to an area without using the mouse, and areas don’t sync to the iPhone version of Things.Īs I explored deeper, I found other bothersome limitations. Then take the “Areas of Responsibility”, something like what other to-do managers call a “context” (but, don’t they advocate tags for contexts?). You’ve now got to delete the date with the mouse. If you wanted to get to the fourth field on the way and just happened to pass through the third field on the way? Tough. When this field gets focus, it is instantly populated with today’s date. For example, when entering a new project with the keyboard, there are four fields. While the UI appeals to me much more than OmniFocus, I found the quirks unpalatable. To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. “Finally,” I thought, “a to-do program I can enjoy using.” I’ve tracked some of the praise for the past year and frankly, found my expectations were really high. Much has been said by many about how beautiful Things is, how Mac-like, how clueful the designers behind Things are, how lives are being improved dramatically by it, and so forth. So it was with no small amount of enthusiasm that I finally tried out OmniFocus’ much sexier competitor: Things. You can re-launch the app, but it’ll out-smart you and re-spin the circle when you go back in. I’ve watched the circle spin for minutes with no indication of what’s happening (just last night, in fact). Most of the time after I launch the iPhone version, the UI just sits there completely non-responsive while I watch a spinning circle. So then I have to remember to go into this special mode out of my normal workflow in the desktop application where I can see them–otherwise, they are lost forever. Even in the latest version, after a ~5 second start-up delay, I’m sometimes able to enter new to-do items, but only in a special mode where I can’t categorize them. For the longest time, you couldn’t actually interact with the iPhone OmniFocus app until >30 seconds after launching it–sometimes not for minutes after launch. I don’t enjoy using it, but I appreciate it.īut, don’t get me started on the mobile version. But with time, its concepts have sunk in and I’m able to be productive with the sucker.
As someone else once said about something else, it’s like I step into a 747 cockpit full of all these daunting controls when all I really wanted was a Cessna. I find the UI quirky and am still in awe of how tracking to-do items can become as complicated and unintuitive as the Omni team have made it. I’ve been using OmniFocus on OS X since the betas and have never really enjoyed it.