Ok, so I wanted to love Omnifocus, I REALLY did ...
It's about the 7th or 8th iPhone app I've tried for managing my GTD system.
As a little background, I am a small business owner with 3 separate (and very different) businesses, as well as a 4th one on my Someday/Maybe list when I can clear the time and finances to launch it. I'm also a musician, and I'd like to think I have a personal life as well. So one of my requirements right off the bat was a system that can help me stay on top of all these different things, while still keeping them separate and delineated in a way that allows me to maintain a sense of control and balance. Realistically that boils down to either a great nesting folder setup WITH ARBITRARY DEPTH, or an EXTREMELY robust tag system with multiple orders of sorting from every view, and/or subtags (the way OF does subcontexts).
Right there 90% of the apps fail because they assume that a single level of folders and maybe one level of subtasks with a few tags thrown in for good measure will suffice for me. But that just doesn't cut it, and it's not that I'm trying to over-complicate things. It's just that when I have to track 30-50 client accounts across several businesses, manage rehearsals and shows and practice for several different bands, and make sure I never miss a bill and don't drop the ball on a relationship rapidly heading towards marriage, I really need a great deal of organizational flexibility to manage everything in a way that makes sense.
Now OF does have a great folder structure, but where they lose me is the unfriendliness of the UI. First of all, the fact that there is no way to sort a folder of projects by any predefined criteria is AMAZINGLY poor design. The only thing I can do is manually reorder them, or let them sit in the order they are entered. If I have a folder with 30 active client accounts, each one it's own separate projects with several discrete actions to be done, it is ridiculous to me that I would have to manually sort them alphabetically just to easily find a particular project if I need to check where I am on an account. Same thing with contexts; I live and work in NYC, and I divide my errand and client visit contexts into geographical zones. There are about 20 in the tri-state area that I use so I know what's nearby whenever I'm in a particular area for any reason. I loved the fact that I could subdivide my travel context into states and then into regions, but again sorting that all into alphabetical order so that I could quickly find the right context when picking from the list to assign to a task was needlessly complex and time-wasting.
Which also brings me to the point that folders and context should use a menu-style selection system, instead of all being listed as one big inline list with : delimiters. Once you get past 2 or 3 sublevels in either one, you start truncating text on the small iPhone screen and you end up having to memorize the middle levels of folders or contexts in order to actually locate the one you're looking for - not to mention that scrolling one big long list also takes significantly longer than going through 2 or 3 levels of menus. And the more folders/projects/contexts I need to organize my stuff, the longer it takes to pick one when creating a new task. This should not be the case, at least not at this stage of the game. Imagine if I had 100 active accounts to manage, and based on all that I do, that's very realistic in the next 12-24 months.
And the decision to go with the silly calendar wheel was ... maddening, to put it mildly. Not only is it a pain and MUCH more time-consuming to use than a normal monthly calendar view, but it also forces you to assign a due TIME when you have a due date, which is totally counter-intuitive to GTD philosophy and can result in unexpected behavior with due/overdue status depending on what due time is selected. I thought the point was that if a due TIME is required, it's probably something that belongs on your calendar and not on your task list. Given that OF lacks a proper calendar, that makes the choice all the more curious.
I realize I may sound like I'm nitpicking, but a critical criteria (at least to me) for a smartphone-based app to manage the collection, processing, and organizing phases of my work is that it be QUICK, EASY, and INTUITIVE to use. Every time I have to fight the device to make it do what I need it to do only makes me less likely to use it on a consistent basis, and the resulting failure to capture 100% of my open loops makes the system far less effective in the long run.
Oh, and it would be nice to have better access to my calendar from inside the app; even if it didn't add any extra functionality onto the native calendar app, at least it cuts down on the number of different places I have to look to see and deal with all of my stuff.
Just some thoughts about how this could really come to be the ultimate GTD app which, so far as I have been able to see, has yet to come into existence. I would love for someone to come and tell me that all my gripes are totally fixable just by changing some option or setting that I overlooked, but somehow I suspect otherwise ... :(
It's about the 7th or 8th iPhone app I've tried for managing my GTD system.
As a little background, I am a small business owner with 3 separate (and very different) businesses, as well as a 4th one on my Someday/Maybe list when I can clear the time and finances to launch it. I'm also a musician, and I'd like to think I have a personal life as well. So one of my requirements right off the bat was a system that can help me stay on top of all these different things, while still keeping them separate and delineated in a way that allows me to maintain a sense of control and balance. Realistically that boils down to either a great nesting folder setup WITH ARBITRARY DEPTH, or an EXTREMELY robust tag system with multiple orders of sorting from every view, and/or subtags (the way OF does subcontexts).
Right there 90% of the apps fail because they assume that a single level of folders and maybe one level of subtasks with a few tags thrown in for good measure will suffice for me. But that just doesn't cut it, and it's not that I'm trying to over-complicate things. It's just that when I have to track 30-50 client accounts across several businesses, manage rehearsals and shows and practice for several different bands, and make sure I never miss a bill and don't drop the ball on a relationship rapidly heading towards marriage, I really need a great deal of organizational flexibility to manage everything in a way that makes sense.
Now OF does have a great folder structure, but where they lose me is the unfriendliness of the UI. First of all, the fact that there is no way to sort a folder of projects by any predefined criteria is AMAZINGLY poor design. The only thing I can do is manually reorder them, or let them sit in the order they are entered. If I have a folder with 30 active client accounts, each one it's own separate projects with several discrete actions to be done, it is ridiculous to me that I would have to manually sort them alphabetically just to easily find a particular project if I need to check where I am on an account. Same thing with contexts; I live and work in NYC, and I divide my errand and client visit contexts into geographical zones. There are about 20 in the tri-state area that I use so I know what's nearby whenever I'm in a particular area for any reason. I loved the fact that I could subdivide my travel context into states and then into regions, but again sorting that all into alphabetical order so that I could quickly find the right context when picking from the list to assign to a task was needlessly complex and time-wasting.
Which also brings me to the point that folders and context should use a menu-style selection system, instead of all being listed as one big inline list with : delimiters. Once you get past 2 or 3 sublevels in either one, you start truncating text on the small iPhone screen and you end up having to memorize the middle levels of folders or contexts in order to actually locate the one you're looking for - not to mention that scrolling one big long list also takes significantly longer than going through 2 or 3 levels of menus. And the more folders/projects/contexts I need to organize my stuff, the longer it takes to pick one when creating a new task. This should not be the case, at least not at this stage of the game. Imagine if I had 100 active accounts to manage, and based on all that I do, that's very realistic in the next 12-24 months.
And the decision to go with the silly calendar wheel was ... maddening, to put it mildly. Not only is it a pain and MUCH more time-consuming to use than a normal monthly calendar view, but it also forces you to assign a due TIME when you have a due date, which is totally counter-intuitive to GTD philosophy and can result in unexpected behavior with due/overdue status depending on what due time is selected. I thought the point was that if a due TIME is required, it's probably something that belongs on your calendar and not on your task list. Given that OF lacks a proper calendar, that makes the choice all the more curious.
I realize I may sound like I'm nitpicking, but a critical criteria (at least to me) for a smartphone-based app to manage the collection, processing, and organizing phases of my work is that it be QUICK, EASY, and INTUITIVE to use. Every time I have to fight the device to make it do what I need it to do only makes me less likely to use it on a consistent basis, and the resulting failure to capture 100% of my open loops makes the system far less effective in the long run.
Oh, and it would be nice to have better access to my calendar from inside the app; even if it didn't add any extra functionality onto the native calendar app, at least it cuts down on the number of different places I have to look to see and deal with all of my stuff.
Just some thoughts about how this could really come to be the ultimate GTD app which, so far as I have been able to see, has yet to come into existence. I would love for someone to come and tell me that all my gripes are totally fixable just by changing some option or setting that I overlooked, but somehow I suspect otherwise ... :(
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