[Brian]

A tweet from the GTDTimes folks caused me to re-stumble across a great bit of writing that I hadn't read in a while. Linking it here so I don't lose track of it again, and because I think it could spark some great discussion.

How to Wrap Your Head Around the Finest (and Most Perplexing) GTD App on the Market

I feel like this article neatly captures the places where OmniFocus currently succeeds (being a trusted system, helping you hide things that aren't relevant, very powerful once you learn to use it), and the places where we need to do a better job. (The steep learning curve. Complexity. New folks don't enjoy all the setup required before they see the benefits and often fear missing actions they can't see.)

What do you guys think?

[SpiralOcean]

Excellent article! Yes, yes and yes.

However, I disagree with the 'complexity' of setting it up. It could just be me, and I understand there is a wide swath of experience out there. But OmniFocus is relatively simple compared to applications like Photoshop.

[SpiralOcean]

Photoshop may be a bit exclusive, although there are plenty of users who use it. But even compared to iPhoto, MS Word, Excel, Numbers, Pages... all of those apps are much more wide open and in my opinion more complex for users. Even for a user to set up Mac mail is more complex than setting up OmniFocus.

The trick for most users is to 'get it'. Changing their view of what a task list is. Especially with outlining, creating children, and what that means.

I find the easiest way to explain how to use outlining is...
If you can't complete an action, what steps would it take to move that action forward toward completion. Create these as children. Then when you get to the first child action, ask the same question, if you can't complete it, what steps would it take to move that action toward completion. Those are children of that action.

If a user does this enough, at some point they will hit the actionable items that are doable.

[Tekneek]

OmniFocus was extremely easy for me. In fact, it is the GTD app that I had wished for and had somehow not come upon yet. It may be more complex for people who are not comfortable with GTD, but I can't seem to put that genie back into the bottle in order to see things from their perspective.

[malisa]

I came back here looking for inspiration. This article is just what I needed. Thanks.

The main point of OmniFocus is to hide things from you that you can’t possibly be doing right now while still letting you track them. This way you don’t have to freak out when you’re looking for a menu of things to do when you roll out of bed in the morning and a million stimuli are bombarding you all screaming for immediate attention. If you don’t use OmniFocus with this end always in mind, you’re missing most of what’s useful about it. Otherwise, OmniFocus is just a weird-looking and pointlessly complicated list-maker.

I usually work on whatever the smallest Macbook available is (upgraded in December from a 12" whatever it was to the small MacBook Pro) and often in OF I feel like I just. need. a bigger. window. I have an big external monitor that I can go use, and I will when I get that feeling. I think now, I realize that that's just an indication that I need to refine my perspectives and look at less.

[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..."