[homagetogorto]

Originally Posted by jasong

I don't think OmniFocus is the kind of program you find on MacUpdate or VersionTracker and decide to play with.

Sure it is.

I first heard about OmniFocus a couple weeks ago from a tuaw.com posting. I hadn't heard of GTD or OmniFocus until then, but the idea of software for "Getting Things Done" (even without the ™) appealed to me. So I watched the video, then downloaded OmniFocus and started playing with it. Then bought the book.

Granted, for 1.0, Omni can probably assume that most of their users are GTD/Kinkless/OmniFocus gurus, so they can focus the software on that audience initially. But once all those users have converted, you need to get new customers from somewhere. And if try-before-you-buy software is too hard to learn or too frustrating to use, people never move past the "try" stage.

Point is, usability matters, as does making it as intuitive as it can be. Dates are part of GTD (the 43 folders), so the date columns should be on by default, for example. And maybe built-in perspectives (on the Perspectives menu) for Coming Due and/or Starting Soon would help, too. (If not built-in, then maybe ship them as samples that we can modify or delete.) Contexts are great in some contexts, but some work simply is date-based, so we have to be able to see our actions/projects by date so we can make the resources we need available, instead of just hoping that Bob or Jane will walk into our office.

At any rate, I consider myself lucky that I am new to GTD so that I don't have to unlearn any previous software, and so that I've got time to play with OmniFocus and figure out how best to apply it to my life before I put it into production. And so I can wait for general release before I trust all my Stuff (again, ™ or not) to it.

... either through experience with OmniOutliner, Kinkless GTD or some other GTD-enabling application.

I guess the shorter version of this post would be that David Allen is still selling his book, so there will be plenty of new OmniFocus users who've never used other GTD software.