[jcarucci]

On March 20th I got frustrated by Omnifocus and decided to switch to Things. I had used Omnifocus for years and I wanted to try something simpler. It has been about a month now and I've decided to move back to Omnifocus. Basically I miss all the power that Omnifocus provides. I lost site of the fact that I really used many of these advanced features that just aren't possible in Things.

There are also a lot of little items in Things that are frustrating. One example is when you are processing an item in the Inbox, it takes 7 taps to move an item to my Errands list vs 4 in Omnifocus. Furthermore, the tag system in Things only allows you to scroll through the list and select the item. If the context you want is at the bottom or deep in a hierarchy, then there is a bit of hunting to find the right context. Omnifocus allows you to start typing in the context field to filter down. So usually 1 or 2 letters from the context name and it pops up ready to apply to your task. These little details add up when you are processing an Inbox of 20 items, which is not unusual on a work day.

Another small item that is really important is having the ability of setting a due date and time. In Things you can only have a due date, no time. Often this is good enough, but sometimes the time is critical. For example, I have to take a Vitamin D pill before I go to bed. In OF I set a start time of 7 PM and a due time of 9 PM. If I don't check off the task before 9, I get an alert on my iPhone at the right time in the day. For Things you only get one alert in the morning, which is useless for something I need to do 12 hours later.

The ability to create hierarchies of folders and projects in Omnifocus also helps organize my busy life with many commitments. The flat list of Things projects quickly becomes too long to navigate properly. Areas helps to some extent, but again, it isn't as powerful as Omnifocus organization.

Reviews on Omnifocus iPad just blows away the review capabilities of Things. What finally made me decide to move back to OF, was the weekly review I did yesterday. There is no review mode in Things, you just have to go through every list. There is no concept of having a setting for a project that you only want to review once a month or once a quarter. It is great to sit down in review mode on OF and only review the things that need a weekly review.

Another bonus is that there are these great, very active forums. People from Omni actually follow them and weigh in which almost never happens with the Things forum.