[bushford]

I have been using kGTD for half a year now, and am therefore keen to see OF asap, because of the possibility of importing my 50+ projects.

I received the sneaky peek yesterday.
In the meantime I have looked at ThinkingRock and iGTD.

TR2 I find to be the most feature-rich but also the least user-friendly.

iGTD is - for the moment - a bit behind on features and somewhat more buggy than TR, but it is moving very fast.

Compared with the 2 above, I find OF's UI better designed - although I wouldn't have minded if it were less like kGTD.

It is however still very limited on features, compared with iGTD and TR, and some basic stuff is missing.

In the coming weeks, I'll start using it alongside kGTD to see how it performs...

[reuben]

I've been REALLY trying to use OmniFocus, because I feel like I should love it as I love the other Omni apps. However, it just isn't cutting it for me. For me a GTD app should be lean and mean, allowing me to see things quickly and efficiently, and primarily keep my hands on the keyboard. I'm just not getting that from OmniFocus. I've tried to replicate my iGTD setup where I have a bunch of different filters in terms of what's due, what's coming up on the horizon, etc. and it just seems to take a tremendous amount of work to get there.

For example, I can't seem to find a way to set a perspective that shows me everything due in the next two days. That seems straightforward, but I can't seem to get it done in OmniFocus.

I'm confident that Omnifocus will get there, but at the moment it seems to cumbersome and non-intuitive, essentially trying to be all things to all people rather than focus on the GTD implementation.

[dhm2006]

Originally Posted by reuben

For example, I can't seem to find a way to set a perspective that shows me everything due in the next two days. That seems straightforward, but I can't seem to get it done in OmniFocus.

Assuming you have due dates on all the actions you want to see, try this:

1. In context view, set the grouping to "Due". It will show you "today", "tomorrow", "within the next week", etc. It will also show past due items.

-- If you set the sorting to "Due" as well, the actions in the "within the next week" section and other similar sections will be in date order also.

-- You can also choose whether to look at just "next" actions, all "available" actions, or all "remaining" actions.

-- I use "due", "due", "available", "any", and "all".

2. Once you have what you want, save the perspective.

NOTE: Make sure you have selected the word "Contexts" at the top of the sidebar if you want everything. Otherwise you will get just the actions in the context(s) which you have selected.

[reuben]

Yeah, I've done that, but that seems at odds with the idea of "focus." I don't want to see what's due within the week, month, etc. I want to focus specifically on what's due today and save a perspective that shows only that. After all, isn't that the idea, being able to drill down to the granular level, or back out to the highest level in an easy manner?

[Frosty Crunch]

One thing I'm discovering is that a proper set of perspectives is necessary to use OmniFocus properly. But the number of settings is so confusing you really need to get to a high level of understanding of the program before you can make your own perspectives and be confident in what they do.

A default set, in the toolbar, would be nice, rather than forcing people to roll their own.

[ksrhee]

Originally Posted by reuben

Yeah, I've done that, but that seems at odds with the idea of "focus." I don't want to see what's due within the week, month, etc. I want to focus specifically on what's due today and save a perspective that shows only that. After all, isn't that the idea, being able to drill down to the granular level, or back out to the highest level in an easy manner?

I agree. If OF can have a date filter, then you can filter the view according to that and save it as a perspective view. For instance, filter by due<=today, and then recall the perspective anytime you want to see anything that's overdue and due today.

[Beckes]

Speaking of "alternatives" and "the competition", let me point out TaskPaper. For the likes of myself, this is much more of a competition to OF. I never have been able to embrace iGTD, which too closely resembles a Japanese video game for my liking: gazillions of buttons and fields, control over everything, but an embarras de richesse, and no guiding principle.

IMHO, OF has a guiding principle: sequential projects, world-class filtering (I will, for the instant, cease and desist to bicker about my ceterum censeo, the "all actions" filter in context view) and other features that let you _reduce "next action" clutter_. This is OF's raison d'être (according to this user), and it is very GTD. I actually do not have parallel projects any more, even if I might perform the actions in parallel -- if I can, I use sequence to prioritise and just enjoy the super-short lists that this entails. I also love that if you check something off, something else from the same project takes its place.

TaskPaper also has also something special: that it is just a parser for text files. As somebody who also appreciates LaTeX and the possibility of general cross-platform data exchange that text files give you, I can see the beauty of this concept. There are excellent tools for working with text, such as TextMate and Nisus (the word processor whose native format used to be text, and which still has the most intuitive implementation of regex on the planet), that let you mangle it into something else almost without looking. Text files are well nigh cross-platform -- completely so if you use utf8 encoding. In TaskPaper, every paragraph in a text file (such as an email) can be turned into a task by prefixing it with a dash, and be given a context merely by typing @context into the para. The format naturally integrates with MarkDown and, as such, can be translated into everything: rtf, latex, html, xml. Heck -- my LaTeX article can _be_ my todo list!

But TaskPaper does not scale very well. My LaTeX article may well be my todo list _for the project concerned_, but OF easily has the upper hand if it comes to handling my commitments to several projects at once. I love both pieces of software as they have a soul (metaphorically speaking), which the vast majority of titles has not, and am exploring ways of combining them.

One more article to finish, and then I'll delve into applescripting OF. I hope there's a way to export projects to, and import projects from, text files.

Cheers,

[ksrhee]

Occasionally, I get the urge to try a few other applications including iGTD or Midnight Inbox, but I seem to come back to OF. I don't know whether it's a clean interface or dedicated folks at Omni, but that seems to be the case.

The announced version 2 of Inbox seems interesting, and I assume OF will eventually move out of alpha into beta. I guess more choices are good for the users, but I'm getting to a point where I need to pick one system and stick to it! I guess playing with new programs are fun, but you got to get your work done, and whichever program helps me to get my work done will win out at the end.

For now, it looks like OF gets the nod.

[curt.clifton]

Originally Posted by Beckes

One more article to finish, and then I'll delve into applescripting OF. I hope there's a way to export projects to, and import projects from, text files.

OF's AppleScripting is very robust. When you're ready to dive in, head over to the OmniFocus Extras forum. Several of us have shared code for scripts to manipulate OF in various ways. My OmniOutliner import/export scripts are available here. Others have posted scripts for plain text import export, iGTD import, and LifeBalance import.