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Well, after 2 months I'm back to Omnifocus.

Last november I switched from Omnifocus to Things. I've been using Omnifocus on and off for the last 5 years or so (I've never used kGTD, although I was contemplating it), but last fall the looong syncing times of OmniFocus drove me nuts, so I switched. I'd been eyeing Things for a while, and its user interface is just so smooth in comparison to OF. Yes, OF for iPad was a big improvement, but still Things looked much better. And yes, I consider myself an OF power user, so it's not that I don't know how to harnass OF's power.

After two months of Things I'm now back to OmniFocus. Yes, Things still looks and feels much better than OF. Yes, syncing times on OF still drive me nuts. But two issues with Things drove me back here:

* the scheduling function in Things may look nice, but it's very clunky to move a repeating task scheduled for a later date back to today. Just a scheduled task you can move, but a repeating task that's waiting for its next instance to appear is immovable. You'd have to delete the repeating task and set up a new one for the new scheduled date. Uggh. Oh, and setting up a scheduled task is a hassle too, on the Mac you can at least change a regular task into a repeating one, but not on the iPhone or iPad. I use repeating tasks a lot, so this annoyance came back multiple times a day.
* syncing of repeating tasks in Things is just plain unreliable. I kept seeing multiple instances of the same repeating task that I couldn't get rid of without completely deleting the repeating task and setting it up again from scratch, repeating tasks that were scheduled for July 1 suddenly popped up telling me they were 18 months overdue, and, worst of all, I kept losing repeating tasks. First time that happened I thought it was user error, but after multiple occassions I'm convinced it's *not* user error, it's Things.

On top of that, Things kept crashing on me multiple times on day. I would have Things crash 3 times before my first cup of coffee in the morning. And the user interface is very inconsistent between the desktop and iOS versions (or even between the iPhone and iPad versions). And although tagging is a very nice feature, keeping track whether or not you've tagged everything with a context is your own responsibility, there's no mechanism in Things to enforce a context like in OF. Okay, enforcing a context is a nuisance sometimes, but it's also nice to know that everything will *have* a context :-).

So now I've moved everything back to OF, and it turned out that moving everything from OF to Things was *way* more work than moving everything back to OF (is that a sign of usability maybe?) I've refined my Perspectives, tweaked the style a bit, and I'm now just enduring long syncing times. It helps a bit to not switch too often between devices, but that can't always be avoided.

I do miss tags, though, so I'm waiting anxiously what OF-2 will bring...