I’m moving back to OF from Things 3, my life has gotten very busy and complicated and Things just looks way too cluttered, everything is always in your face.
The one thing I am going to miss is the “Headings” where you can just visually sort items in an arbitrary way and group them under a heading. I think Omnifocus could greatly benefit from this feature.
Would action groups solve this?
If not, definitely write your feature request up, explaining why action groups don’t quite fit the bill for you and email it in .
I agree. I recently switched back to OmniFocus from Todoist, but I tried the trial version of Things as well. The headings almost made me stay there, though my ultimate concern was that it would eventually end up too cluttered. Action groups are functionally a better implementation of this as they can be collapsed, but visually, headings really stand out and make it easy to see the structure of a project at a glance.
In my own humble opinion, action groups should automatically get a different font weight (bold perhaps). Then it would be easier to see that there are steps nested below. This would also make the action group look more like headings in Things 3.
Bonus: If there was a preference to change the appearance of action groups more than just changing the font weight to bold, that would be awesome :).
How did you move your Things activities into OmniFocus?
I came to this forum because I too am migrating from Things. I find that OF doesn’t even accept drag and drop from Things. So its a lot of manual copy past text. There has to be a faster way. I found an Apple script but it doesn’t appear to work for my on my High Sierra system with the current versions of Things & OmniFocus.
For the record, the reason I migrated was I needed to use a task manager that supported WebDAV for secure syncing across devices. I was a former OmniFocus user to had migrated to Things because I found GTD requiring too much administrative time and the GTD features in OF made it messier than wanted. Sort of similar to the reason you came to OF from Things.
Anyhow, I feel like I am returning to a familiar place. Unfortunately, my Things task list is huge. I need to move them to OF.
You can enter you text in this website, and it will generate the text in multiple styles (including bold).
Then copy the styled text and paste it in your action group name field.
I personally don’t use action groups, but let me know if that was of any help! x
I type 110 WPM, so I just quickly did them manually.
Unfortunately, none of the old scripts work so typing manually is the only way to go.
I too tried Things and came away with the opinion that it does not scale well.
Action Groups are a sore topic for me. For years I have been asking for changing their appearance and to also show them with the task when using a context based perspective.
Omni has the same attitude toward them as Culture Code’s Headings. The tasks should stand on their own. Headings and Action Groups are just ways to visually group the data. I honestly hate that is the stance that both of these companies took. It leads to unnecessary typing on an iOS device.
The topic came up again on Omni’s slack group. So far it seems they are considering making it an option to show the Action Group’s name with a task in a context view. Hopefully they will change the formatting of the Action Group as well.
Right now I would wait and see for OF3 to progress a little more. It seems they aren’t worried just yet how it looks. (Look at all that vertical white space in OF3 on an iOS device)
Personally I continue to feel that the lack of love Omni has shown for Action Groups holds usage back for a lot of us. I think Action Groups, if implemented right, could really be another differentiator and get even more usage.
I started testing OF3 on iOS and OSX.
They both support perspectives that show the Project hierarchy. It also works with action groups. I can now see the action group a task is part of.
My preferred perspective is: Any tasks that is available and either has a Today tag or is due soon. Group and sort: Entire Projects.
