A Preview of OmniFocus

The internet is saturated in GTD (Getting Things Done) mania, a system created by Religious Figure GTD Guru David Allen.

David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” has been hailed as the in-vogue system for, naturally, getting things done. Or as I like to think, a to-do list on steroids. I will admit, I’ve read David Allen’s book, and it does make sense.

As for keeping all of my to-dos in one place on my Mac, I have drifted from many different applications. I have used iGTD with limited success, and eventually moved over to iCal by using categories and the integrated to-do list. It’s limited, but does gets the job done. When I first heard about OmniFocus, I was very intrigued. This is an application from OmniGroup: a company that A) IMHO makes great apps, and B) has been with OS X development since the beginning. When I heard that OmniGroup was taking advice from Merlin Mann and Ethan Schoonover, both GTD masters in their own right, I knew I had to try this app.

I think the first thing to say about OmniFocus is that it’s deep, which I feel is the best and worst part of OmniFocus. It offers all the bells and whistles that power users demand, but is so complex that it may intimidate GTD beginners. At this time, I could not find appropriate documentation for OmniFocus in the help menu, but a quick-start video (180mb, 50mb version here) and an interface reference chart PDF do exist. Perhaps at release, the documentation will be enough to educate new users.

To put it plainly, OmniFocus feels like Microsoft Word: At the surface, it gets the job done, but to get to the true power of the application, you really have to know how to use it well. It’s not as click-and-go as other Mac applications tend to be. Your palette for tasks is the Inspector window, which allows you to modify your actions as you see fit. There are so many options to play with, it’s like having a huge piece of paper with a box of 300 crayons: it’s intimidating, but your options are virtually limitless.

However, I sometimes felt constrained by the Inspector window. I couldn’t figure out how to change the default “in-order list” to “single-action list” without consulting the inspector window. Somehow, I wish that this option would be in a contextual menu, but alas, it isn’t. Putting the depth aside, OmniFocus is a really great application. The design is what won me over. It’s elegant, simple, and retains the graphical polish that OmniGroup puts into all of it’s apps.

Adding items is a dream, and uses a auto-complete feature to allow you to enter everything by keyboard. No extra clicks or drags required. Got a due date on a task? OmniFocus uses natural entry as well, and can translate the text “tomorrow” to an actual date. OmniFocus integrates well with other applications like iCal and Mail.app: it allows you to sync your to-dos with iCal, and get information from Mail.app quickly into OmniFocus. I can’t tell you how much I love having my GTD actions synced to my iPhone calendar.

Notifying you of upcoming events works well, and there are plenty of preferences, including adding a number of upcoming items in the dock, the sidebar, and the menubar. This application is geared towards people who have hundreds of actions, and caters to alerting you to a very specific list. It’s sometimes hard to just get to a master list. Only the future will tell us what OmniFocus may bring. OmniFocus will retail for $79.95, but if you pre-order now, you can get it for $39.95. OmniFocus officially releases on January 8th, 2008, but a beta can be downloaded right now.

Mind you, I am still somewhat of a GTD beginner, so I tend to gravitate to simple systems. iCal was a simple system, and I naturally was drawn to it. OmniFocus has many more “bells and whistles” than my iCal system, but with many new GTD applications on the horizon, OmniFocus has enough power and exposure to lead the pack.

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