Sticking with it
 

Let's see if this would translate to words very well:

I have been an OmniFocus user from the early days but I constantly find myself veering away from constant use. Been mulling over why this may be, and my conclusion is that it's because the work that I consider most important — writing code most of the time — doesn't easily gel with the task philosophy of OmniFocus (or maybe any other task manager). The stuff that drives my coding process is usually captured in my thoughts or some flow charts or maybe bug trackers etc. I have tried using OF for managing some coding tasks but it's much better for me to keep these in a simple text file (no contexts required, no start/due dates, not much organization needed, etc.)

In any case, the result: my OF houses well managed tasks lists for everything else (general upkeep of self, family, business, house, etc.) that I find myself running from just a tad. I would much rather keep working on my code and therefore ignore a lot of important things for couple of days.

I am wondering if anyone else has felt this problem (that I have tried very hard to describe), and if they have found some measure of reconciliation.

I personally think that OF is perfect for task management of those one-off projects/tasks that don't happen on a daily basis. There are a lot of people who try to think that OF should be the everything GTD programbut it really isn't.

I think I would rather keep coding tasks in either OmniOutliner or a mind map.

My calendar program is perfect for the appointments and events. You can kind of use OF for dates but it would really be shoehorning it in.

I use DevonThink for my file references. I wouldn't think of storing e-mails, PDFs, etc. inside OF. DevonThink (or whatever personal file manager of your choice is), Circus Ponies Notebook, and Yojimbo are better suited for storing that kind of stuff. But I do use URL links to connect my OF tasks to my DevonThink database and Apple Mail.

I'd love to have OF do my higher horizons of focus. But I'm using Mindjet Mindmanager as my program of choice to work on my higher horizons.

Just think of OF as one tool in your GTD toolbox.

Agree with wilsonng - my work projects are 95% one-off tasks I need to not forget, with a couple of projects that are reminders of the broad categories of things I need to check up on in a given day. Decision seeds, basically.

Are any of my people out? I need to hand their must-be-done-today work to someone else. Are we on top of the departmental stuff we need to be on top of? Have I answered any emails I'm responsible for? When was the last time I checked off my "look at the forums" action? Stuff like that.

From what I've seen of the engineers here that use OmniFocus, I don't think every task they plan to work on goes into OmniFocus - they have a couple of lists/buckets in the app we use to browse our bug database for that. OmniFocus helps them remember to look at those lists, though and helps them remember exceptions or tasks that aren't going to go into that database.

[QUOTE=antikraft;96463]In any case, the result: my OF houses well managed tasks lists for everything else (general upkeep of self, family, business, house, etc.) that I find myself running from just a tad. I would much rather keep working on my code and therefore ignore a lot of important things for couple of days.[/QUOTE]

Re-reading my response, I didn't address this as well as I thought I did when I wrote it.

Another advantage of the "broad lists of mundane tasks you check regularly" approach is that it doesn't take up a ton of time when you are working on those majority tasks, but it ensures that you're regularly checking the place where the exceptions live - and hopefully seeing/dealing with them.

Should help avoid the "ignore it for a couple days" effect. Well, as much as software can. :-)