Omnifocus vs. Things

Over the past two and half years of using GTD I’ve tried a plethora of different applications and methods. On both the PC and now the Mac I have indulged my inner geek by tinkering with my GTD system, and the applications I use to support it. I outlined my current system in a video a little while back, although that is now slightly out of date. Omnifocus was the backbone of my system  and I was fairly happy with it.

There were niggles though. I didn’t like how it dealt with Areas of Responsibility, items I was waiting for others to move, or things that I wasn’t wanting to do right now, but rather at some undecided point in the future (I’m going to assume here that you’re familiar with basic GTD concepts. If not go and read the Wikipedia article first. I’ll wait right here).

At the same time as I was getting more and more niggled with Omnifocus, people were raving about Things, a new app developed by a German firm called Cultured Code. It was, they said, simple and elegant. I downloaded the trial and was impressed, so I sprung for the whole package and took advantage of a day off work to move everything over.

Installation was a doddle and Things is a pretty application. The layout is pleasing to the eye and looks very Mac. The icon in particular is a thing of beauty – very well designed. I used the built in clipper to pull everything from Omnifocus to the Things inbox and settled in with a bottle of Pepsi and good long playlist to start processing to zero.

That’s when the problems began. In Omnifocus one configures contexts, places where you do work. It’s easy to make this mandatory, ensuring that every action captured is linked to the place you need to be in to carry out the work. Things does a similar thing, using tags. These append to any action and are far more open in how they may be applied. For example I might have an action to call Rodney, one of my clients. To do this I need to be at my work phone. In Omnifocus I’d simply add the ‘Phone – work’ context and a due date and know I’d be prompted at the right place and time.

In Things I would need to add an ‘@phone-work’ tag. However it would be possible to skip this, or to accidentally misspell the tag and not be informed. I did this a good few times inputting the initial 200 or so actions and I spent too much time putting these right. Things also has a bug where the tags get duplicated and added to the task title when saving or syncing. This is a minor thing, but seeing the task ‘Respond to BFHS mail’ become ‘Respond to BFHS Mail @Mac @Mac @Mac @Mac @Mac’ got old pretty quickly.

The other major way in which GTD actions are sorted is by project. This is the goal, the end result you want from the actions you carry out. Omnifocus lets you drag and drop to arrange these, or sticks them in alphabetical order by default. Things leaves them in the order they’re added, or you can manually drag them about. This is a little bit of a pain when you’ve got 100+ projects and you want to be able to view them at a glance.

Once I had the where sorted out, I needed to look at the when. Say I have a meeting I need to prepare for at the end of next month. I need to see that action in time to allow me to get it done. However I don’t plan to even look at it for a fortnight. This is super easy in Omnifocus,  using the available [']from['] and [']due by['] date fields. Again Things falls down here. It is possible to set due dates, but I have to click through to an options field and I never did get to grips with quickly making tasks only available from a particular date.

One feature of Things which I really liked was the way it expected you to set Areas of Responsibility, and to use these as a way of tracking items. You can do a similar thing in Omnifocus, by creating folders for projects, but this is not as apparent straight away. However, Things only allows you to view either single actions of projects when looking at an area. It does not allow you to view the actions within a project. You can click through, but it is not possible to look at multiple projects and compare them. Given that viewing Areas of Responsibility is a great way to kickstart the runway level thinking that you need to determine next actions, this was a real pain.

This last really sums up my experience of Things. I really wanted to like it. It is a attractive piece of software, and it is very easy to get going out of the box. For those new to GTD, or who are looking for a simple task manager it would probably suit very well. However Omnifocus is simply more powerful, more flexible. It is still pretty, and it can do so much more. For me Omnifocus is streets ahead of Things.

This flexibility is a curse for Omnifocus users however. It is very easy to get up and running with it, but to miss so many of the more powerful options. Features like Available From dates and Perspectives can help you work so much better. The next post will show how I use these and give some suggestions on how to tweak Omnifocus to make it really work for you.

Tagged as: Cultured Code, Getting Things Done, GTD, Mac, Omnifocus, Onmi Group, OS X, OSX, things