For to-do-list software, I’ve been using Things 3 by Cultured Code for most of the past 14 years, but when I started the new job, at first I thought I wouldn’t be able to continue to use Things, so i switched to Todoist, because it’s a pretty good app and it integrates well with Microsoft Outlook.
Two weeks into the new job, I learned I could use Things after all, and I was getting a little frustrated with Todoist in the Mac. It’s not a native Mac app, and it shows. Working with Todoist seems to require more taps and keystrokes than it should, and sometimes menus scroll off the top or bottom of the screen, requiring scrolling to see everything. And Todoist doesn’t support start dates for tasks, which I find important to my workflow.
This gave me an opportunity to start fresh and reevaluate task management software. Going back to Things would be about the same amount of work as just starting with something new. And Things is rigid—it works great if your brain works like Things wants it to, but I was finding it a bit difficult to work with.
Switching to-do apps is dangerous for me! I have wasted a lot of time fiddling with productivity apps. While I usually come back to Things, I’ve also tried OmniFocus, Todoist, the Tasks plugin for Obsidian, TickTick, Workflowy, Remember the Milk, Microsoft To Do, Taskpaper, todo.txt, bullet journaling and probably others I’m forgetting about.
I realized that what I want is something like Todoist but with a nicer Mac app, and with support for start dates.
So I went to Omnifocus. Here are some first impressions:
Pluses:
- It’s a nice-looking app on the Mac and iPhone.
- Has start dates, just like I want it
- Seems surprisingly flexible. In the early days of the app, 15+ years ago, Omnifocus rigidly conformed to David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, but now It seems pretty loose.
Also added to the plus column: Omnifocus is, as far as I can determine, unique among task managers in that it’s very easy to import and export task lists in human-readable format. So if I want to do housecleaning on the task manager—get rid of projects I’m not going to get to anytime soon—without outright deleting the projects, Omnifocus will let me easily do that.
Minuses:
- Expensive. Mitigated by my already having paid for earlier versions so being eligible for a discount.
Could go either way—maybe a plus, maybe a minus, maybe no big deal:
- Really wants everything to be a Project. I like using single-actions. Yes, “write article” is technically a dozen or so steps, from thinking about how to start research to proofreading and submitting. But I don’t need to list those steps—at least, not in my to-do app. (Though maybe I should—and there certainly are things I do need to write down for every article, like lists of people I want to email for interviews).
- Extremely flexible and customizable, leading to a moral hazard to fiddle with Omnifocus when I should be doing other things.
