4/11/2023 0 Comments Something like omnifocus for mac![]() ![]() ![]() Luckily, there are a few solutions to this. It was that early paranoia about urgent tasks that made me almost switch back to Things. The critical tasks were spread all over, hidden behind various perspectives and View settings that aren’t initially intuitive. There is no clear equivalent of Things’ Today view where I could see an overview of what’s important. I had been flagging important tasks and marking due dates, but they weren’t consistently visible anywhere. Meanwhile, as I grappled with trying to hide low-priority tasks, I could hear the distant cries of my urgent tasks, buried in some tab or section, calling for help. Expert users rarely permanently change these settings, so the behaviour makes a sort of sense, it’s just poorly signalled in the UI. You’ll probably spend the first while confused why you’re seeing tasks you didn’t expect in any given list. Changing these view settings will update the filter, but only for that Perspective, and by default it won’t save them. They reduce what you see in each list, which lets you focus on tasks that aren’t completed, deferred, or blocked. It’s the thing with an eye on it, okay?Īnyway, this View menu button menu contains filter options, and occasionally also sort options. It’s a button called View, with a menu in it. There’s also the usual menu called View, but this is a different thing, also called View, but it’s not in the menu bar, even though a menu comes out of it. Each perspective in OmniFocus has a View menu. Deferring them initially does “nothing” since the default view is All, which shows deferred items. By default though, OmniFocus’ inbox items only go away if you give them a project AND a context AND click “Clean Up”. In Things, inbox items go away as soon as you give them a defer date or a project. Even though I’d put most of the tasks into projects, hundreds of them stayed in my inbox. I started with my inbox, which looked like some kind of Superfund site. The only task I knew was important was “Tame OmniFocus”. Once I got my tasks in though, I had a fairly serious problem: OmniFocus now held 500 long-term tasks, 45 short-term tasks, and 5 urgent tasks mixed together in its opaque and mysterious puzzlebox. You can actually drag a list of tasks from Things to a text editor, clean it up, and paste the lines into OmniFocus to re-create them which works okay. There is no import from Things, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. On the surface, OmniFocus’s UI doesn’t seem so intimidating. Luckily for me, I was set up to keep pushing forward: I had already paid for OmniFocus, I had tech support from Nigel here at Steamclock, and I had publicly announced that I was making the switch. It was bad enough – and stressful enough – that I almost bailed on OmniFocus entirely. Unexpectedly, my productivity fell into a pit for a week. I knew learning a new task app could be hectic, but I’m okay at computers, so I expected getting the hang of OmniFocus would take perhaps an afternoon. Omni also has a reputation as an excellent platform citizen on iOS and the Mac, unlike… some other apps. OmniFocus is recommended so often and so emphatically that it’s the natural next step. I needed an app to help me to focus on what’s important, and keep what’s not important out of the way. It was getting too hard to focus on anything. I’d end up with these massive defer-bombs, where I’d wake up some days with 50 tasks in my Today view. Eventually, the number of tasks I was managing outgrew Things’ workflow. Over time though, my job got more complex, and I got better at logging what I needed to do. This worked relatively well – for a while. I lived out of its Today view, which highlights tasks that are due or that you’ve chosen to do today, and lets you schedule tasks to appear in Today sometime in the future. “Learn React Native” doesn’t get done, but “Find and run a React Native sample project” does.Īnyway, Things was the first task app that ever stuck for me. In particular, the idea of recording the next physical action towards your goal is priceless. I don’t formally use GTD, but I’ve come to learn and appreciate its key principles. I get things done on the Mac, and occasionally use the iOS app for quickly capturing a task or checking off shopping items. ![]() ![]() Given that, I wanted to share my little journey and some of the pits I fell into along the way.įor three years I’d been managing my tasks with Things, and it was fine. It turns out, OmniFocus is a bit like Photoshop: great to know, hard to learn. Yet somehow, my first day using it was a disaster. After three years of managing my tasks with Things, I switched to OmniFocus. A couple months ago, I made a big change in how I work. ![]()
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