[zoisite]

The main point of OmniFocus is to hide things from you.

... at the risk of some actions may falling through the cracks.

It's not a bug, It's a feature! Creative advertisement strategy :)

No offense. As I explained in detail in another thread here, OmniFocus' lack of tags/multiple contexts worries me that I could miss some important actions because I can assign only one context to each of them which leads to not seeing them in other related contexts. The intimidating multitude of options doesn't help either.

Before reading the article I hoped that it would explain how to get around this problem. But it only discusses the basic mechanics that I already knew.

I think we will all agree on this: a major purpose of a task management app is to narrow down the long list of all of your tasks to a reasonably smaller list that contains only the tasks you need/want to do now. That's what is meant by "it hides things from you", show the important ones and hide the unimportant (important is defined by what you need/want/like to do now according to your current situation).

A rule of thumb: A task management app should show as little as possible and as much as necessary to help the user focus on just the important stuff.

Like OmniFocus, Things does also allow you to hide unimportant stuff and it does so by a tagging system that does this job imho much better (tags allow you to look at the same task from different points of view => tasks are less likely to slip through, because many "eyes" look at them).

Congratulations, so what? "Hiding unimportant stuff" is not an exclusive OmniFocus feature like this thread would like to suggest. As if this would be something special. Its just an elementary feature that every task management application has to have.

I see a danger (at least for the unexperienced user) that actions get buried deep inside project hierarchies — like: "forget to flag a task and it is lost". Being able to nest sub-projects into projects (and sub-sub-projects into sub-projects and...) is a great organizational feature, but it is also dangerous that they become graves in that tasks get buried.

As I said many times OmniFocus is incredibly powerful (much more than Things), but not used right it can lead to disaster. That is the main advantage of Things: It is designed so simple and self-explanatory that it is virtually impossible for you to miss a task (one would have to try really really hard to do so or be really dumb). If you will, Things is foolproof - OmniFocus is not (because it is more sophisticated).

+1 for tags in OmniFocus. They would help a lot to make it foolproof, so that it is less likely for a task to "fall through the cracks".

I may have been a bit harsh, but I wanted to express some critical thoughts against the general hooray tone in this thread. Just to add a little constructive criticism to the party.

Well, in an ironic and twisted way the quote is quite right.

"Indeed, OmniFocus does hide things from you..."