[psidnell]

I was using GTD (poorly) after reading The Book so I had some inkling of what a Context was meant to represent before I started using OmniFocus. But I remember being as confused as hell about what a Perspective was.

I have a suspicion that these days more and more people are coming to OmniFocus without any clear idea of what GTD is at all, but they will have used (and outgrown) some other task manager or TODO app - even if its just some crappy toy built in to their phone.

People who've taken this path will probably have an instinctive understanding of Projects (task lists) and be expecting some variant of a tagging scheme - if only because tagging is becoming a common feature of much task/note/photo management software these days. This is common currency now.

What they find instead are a ton of new concepts - Contexts, Perspectives, Focussing, Parallel/Sequential groups, next actions, inspectors and more modes than they'd ever thought possible - all bound up in an initially terrifying user interface that does inexplicable things to the uninitiated.

(I ask you, if a cat sat on a new users keyboard when OmniFocus was running, how long would it take them to undo what happened?)

Though these concepts are undoubtedly powerful and fully consistent with the vision of GTD, they do require that many users abandon their ingrained and often cherished practices in return for what may seem to them like questionable rewards.

It seems to me that OmniFocus is being pulled in two different directions by two large sections of the user base: the old guard GTD Purists and the more recent pragmatists (which is where all the new sales are coming from after all).

The endless Tagging vs Contexts debate is emblematic of this.

It's going to take some nifty footwork from Omni to keep both camps happy.