It's only with hindsight and having traveled (some!) of the path,
that I'll be bold enough to say that for me the currently available screencasts bear little resemblance to the actual use of the application.
I know that it must be difficult to decide on "what to cover" in a screencast, because:-
- People have different approaches to organising and interpretation of GTD.
- Copyright infringement occurs, if you talk in terms of the GTD method (so you can't cover much of the David allen approach).
The observations that I make about omnifocus are as follows:-
Positives
1) It was an extremely reliable application (it did Not crash or lose any of my entries-ever!)
2) data-base was rock solid and it had excellent automatic backup features.
3) It appearance was immaculate - looked beautiful
4) The tools and filters were extensive.
5) moving and arranging data was a breeze
6) operation in "context" mode was intuitive, instinctive and intelligent!
Negatives
1) NOT flexible - I wasn't familiar with the GTD methology & omnifocus was harsh on me - from day 1. I tried to see if i could approach it from my way of working instead of the "absolute GTD approach", because of this It became a "low-level application" as i'd lost some of the powerful featues.
2) NOT instinctive/intuitive (without a GTD understanding) -
without a GTD understanding, my productivity got worse from the moment that i started using OF. The experience was a very long winded & frustrating one (hundreds of hours, months and months). If you decide to implement your own approach (instead of a GTD approach) then you may experience what i experienced (a daily struggle with the application).
3) I thought that I could learn the application in "tandem" with learning GTD. But it was an almighty struggle. (see 6)
4) I thought that OF could instinctively teach me (Learn-by-doing) the GTD method. I was sadly mistaken.
5) I found the tools powerful, but only once you apply them in a GTD fashion.
6) I believe that The planning mode is omnifocus' is the "weakest link". It behaves illogically and irrationally on many fronts (probably because it will NOT function outside the GTD approach) - I make this point in another post
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=10718.
7)The context mode seems to be smooth and rational
8)My personal journey has been painful and I wouldn't want anybody to go through what I have gone through.
9) So my advice is:-
- If you have the time and you have the ambition to learn how to use omnifocus effectively then learn the GTD methology first.
- If your life is so busy and you are sinking with the tasks that you need to do, then for the moment use another application (maybe have a look at omnioutliner) as OF for me did nothing else other than make me more unproductive.
- At some future date come back to OF once you have the time that you wil need to master the ideas.
- Omnifocus is NOT a testing bed for experimenting and trialling different ideas and ways of working. I have found out this the hard way. It will only work in one way - the GTD way !!
- Discriminative- I was willing to change and adapt and learn the new methods, but my entry point had to be from my current way of working. In that sense OF is NOT a very accessible application - It is very discriminative.
Finally - I don't want anyone to be under the illusion that the GTD method can be mastered quickly either - its taken time (quite a lot of time for me) to assimilate the ideas and apply the ideas to my way of thinking and doing. You will have to do the same. The GTD method is complex - but maybe others will disagree?