I got a notification that the OmniFocus subscription I forgot all about was about to expire, so naturally I had to go see what I made of that. It was sort of interesting reapproaching OF through the lens of having spent a bunch of time trying different task management tools before deciding to make my own that did everything I wanted.
My past reaction to OmniFocus has traditionally been “no, get it away from me.” Some of that reaction is to the tool itself and some of it is cultural: I remember OmniFocus when it was a bunch of AppleScript meant to make OmniOutliner do unnatural things, and I remember the culture it came out of. And some of that reaction is from thinking it is just too much, but that “productivity wang overkill” is pretty much its most loyal niche.
So I didn’t like its chances. But I had Claude write a quick importer for me that turned all my denote-task tasks into OmniFocus tasks, and I was able to quickly get some production data to work with.
My sole objective was to see how amenable – despite all its gears, buttons, and blinking lights – OmniFocus would be to just giving me my river of tasks and then providing ways to filter the river down.
To be honest, pretty well. The tool to use to get to the base view is Perspectives, and you can make a simple one that just shows all your open tasks and lists due dates, tags, and parent projects. I added a group-by-date to give me “today, the next week, the next month, beyond” grouping.
For project view, there’s a Projects perspective that’s fine. I just dragged them all into order.
To clean up the view a little I just collapsed the inspector sidebar on the right and the … sidebar sidebar? … on the left. That got me pretty much the view I have in denote-tasks, which I’ve taken to thinking of as “the big dumb list view.”
I still think OmniFocus is probably overkill for me, but I have a new appreciation for its flexibility.
I also did this exercise with Things, which I’ve always felt more warmly toward.
It is not really able to do the Big Dumb List view because it wants to show you today, upcoming, and anytime in discrete areas. I prefer seeing today + upcoming in the same place because sometimes I don’t want to do a today thing right now and like just looking down the list for a one- or two-pointer I can pick off.