[elrjax]

Hi.

I have been using OmniFocus for about a year, and GTD on and off for several years. I moved from paper into electronic tools rather quickly, being an electronic kind of guy :-), and have never looked back. But, I am experiencing a frustration with OmniFocus that I wanted to express.

My biggest problem with OmniFocus is the lack of a "today" meta context.

To get around this I have had to use start and due dates to make the "badging" light up on certain days/weeks/months. However, the problem with using dates is that my review times are spent primarily moving dates around; dates which I mostly wouldn't even use if there was a notion of 'today', 'this week', 'this month', etc. I have incorporated some of Curt's applescripting to help, but I still spend most of my review fiddling with the dates. Or, not fiddling with the dates and putting up with useless badging.

I have read Omni's view about keeping the purity of GTD, but if I were on a card-based system, I would simply pull out the cards for today from my morning review and put them in my pocket. Also, you can use colored index cards to indicate different priorities, or other 'meta' information. You can also put an asterisk on the card or dog-ear it to further indicate some meta information. To be true to GTD, I believe much of this functionality must follow through from the tools used. To artificially limit their use makes the tool less useful. I don't want to have all my data in OmniFocus and then have to cut and paste to "remember the milk" or some other program as a task list (with or without linking). I want to do it in one place, as quickly and as simply as possible.

I understand that some use the flag for the 'today' indicator, but I already use the flag to indicate tasks that absolutely, positively must get done and require constant, prioritized attention (i.e. things that are important to my boss :-).

Almost everything else on my list is already overdue anyway :-), or if not overdue then the 'when' is up to me, making dates somewhat pointless except as general timeframe indicators. So, for my morning, evening, and weekly reviews, instead of reviewing for content, I am spending most of the review fiddling dates that are somewhat meaningless as dates (right now, in my morning review (put off from yesterday) I have to fiddle the dates on thirty tasks that only had dates set so I could have the badging light up during the week, but are also accumulated from prior weeks). This could be accomplished easier, with a smaller number of tasks involved, if I could set a 'today' indicator in my morning review ('this week', 'this month', or tags would be nice also).

With screencastsonline reviewing 'things', I was tempted to move over to 'things' again (tags, 'today', etc.), but having tried it before, I feel I would be taking a step backward for much of what I am doing, and I would lose the automation I have built (or borrowed :-).

Bottom line for me is that I want to do much less work, spending much less time, being much less perfect with my organizational tools. My hope from this post is to hear that Omni is going to add a 'today' meta context and tags to the next release of OmniFocus, so all I have to do is wait :-). Or, that there is something simple that I have missed that makes the sun shine and the birds sing :-).

Thanks for listening.

-Ed

(BTW, did you notice that you can set tags on the post, but not on an OF task :-)?