Eddie Black
Registered
Been an OF user since OF1 and have it on iPad, iMac, MBP, and iPhone. I've toyed with Things 1 and 2, and a few other apps (Todoist, Todo, Remember the Milk, Asana, etc...) but always came back to OF. Things 3 is beautiful and elegant. It actually gives me some joy to open it up. OF now seems clunky, dated, and hard to use. But I kept adding all of my tasks into Things to give it a good try.
I am a training coordinator that plans training events a year out. So naturally deferred tasks are a biggie for me. I'm also a Platoon Sergeant in the Army National Guard. I will give out tasks to my SL's and wait for them to report back. And there are other areas. So in this, OF has shined. It is lacking because I cannot have an Agenda item context AND a waiting context at the same time. Creating so many profiles in OF gets unwieldy (make a perspective that uses search for a person's name, displaying all remaining tasks, multiply by number of people I'd need to have an agenda for and you see how it gets). Also, changing dates OF has, to me, never been easy. It's always been a point of friction. And switching back and forth between Available and Remaining views is two clicks, but it gets quite annoying at times without a keyboard shortcut.
Things is such a breath of fresh air in this regard. Simple. Elegant. And super easy to adjust defer and due dates.
Now to what bugs me about Things. I try to use the GTD model in that I look at my context and then what tasks fit that. I thought that the lack of serial lists in Things would not bother me. After all, you can't hide tasks on a paper planner, and people use that in GTD. Still, the other day I sat down and wanted to send an email out. I easily searched by tag in Things ( just start typing on the Mac, or pull down on iOS and start typing). I had 54 emails show up. By comparison, in OF I had 4. The majority of emails that showed up in Things were emails that occur AFTER something else happens. Example, I do a site visit for a training and deem it is okay, I'll email out the information to someone. Or if I receive a requested report, I'll email it up the chain to the next person. I noticed that as I added more and more to Things 3, what joy I had from simply opening the app started to be displaced by the cognitive fatigue of having to scan and determine what was actionable and what wasn't.
I so very badly want to use Things. I keep trying to use it every other week. But the overload is too much. I keep going back to OmniFocus. Yes, it is clunky and looks like a 70's haircut in the 80's, and there are some dire needs to be addressed now (header rows appearing in task lists, projects without next actions showing in project list view, perspectives of a folder are unable to be truly worked in, and much more), but the ability to focus on the next action items is key. I can open it up, see a handful of things, and quickly move on. It isn't easy to batch edit on iOS (Things, again, REALLY knocks it out the park here), but I'm crossing my fingers for OF3 to be something truly great.
I am a training coordinator that plans training events a year out. So naturally deferred tasks are a biggie for me. I'm also a Platoon Sergeant in the Army National Guard. I will give out tasks to my SL's and wait for them to report back. And there are other areas. So in this, OF has shined. It is lacking because I cannot have an Agenda item context AND a waiting context at the same time. Creating so many profiles in OF gets unwieldy (make a perspective that uses search for a person's name, displaying all remaining tasks, multiply by number of people I'd need to have an agenda for and you see how it gets). Also, changing dates OF has, to me, never been easy. It's always been a point of friction. And switching back and forth between Available and Remaining views is two clicks, but it gets quite annoying at times without a keyboard shortcut.
Things is such a breath of fresh air in this regard. Simple. Elegant. And super easy to adjust defer and due dates.
Now to what bugs me about Things. I try to use the GTD model in that I look at my context and then what tasks fit that. I thought that the lack of serial lists in Things would not bother me. After all, you can't hide tasks on a paper planner, and people use that in GTD. Still, the other day I sat down and wanted to send an email out. I easily searched by tag in Things ( just start typing on the Mac, or pull down on iOS and start typing). I had 54 emails show up. By comparison, in OF I had 4. The majority of emails that showed up in Things were emails that occur AFTER something else happens. Example, I do a site visit for a training and deem it is okay, I'll email out the information to someone. Or if I receive a requested report, I'll email it up the chain to the next person. I noticed that as I added more and more to Things 3, what joy I had from simply opening the app started to be displaced by the cognitive fatigue of having to scan and determine what was actionable and what wasn't.
I so very badly want to use Things. I keep trying to use it every other week. But the overload is too much. I keep going back to OmniFocus. Yes, it is clunky and looks like a 70's haircut in the 80's, and there are some dire needs to be addressed now (header rows appearing in task lists, projects without next actions showing in project list view, perspectives of a folder are unable to be truly worked in, and much more), but the ability to focus on the next action items is key. I can open it up, see a handful of things, and quickly move on. It isn't easy to batch edit on iOS (Things, again, REALLY knocks it out the park here), but I'm crossing my fingers for OF3 to be something truly great.