Omnifocus, Things, 2Do etc..... You know where this is going

NickH · June 8, 2018, 8:12am

Again, I just want to say thank you for all of your answers.

I’ll reiterate… This community is hands down one of the best things about OmniFocus.

To give you guys an update (and to anyone else who stumbles across this thread) - I’m currently giving Things3 my full attention.

The reasons behind that are very specific to me and my workflow, but here it is:

• I don’t have a large project library or many to do’s. Whilst OmniFocus does indeed cater for big and small, I found it to be a little overbearing with such few tasks.

• I’m not a big user of tags/contexts, so that rules out one of the negatives of Things. If I did want to have saved searches for tags/context, I’d certainly use OF.

• I predominantly use the today/upcoming views on Things - Again, because I don’t have a huge amount of tasks to do, I find this a very easy way to look at my to do’s.

• There is something very pleasing about using Things3 - I would never chose a task manager based on look, but if all things are equal, it goes a long way in helping to make your decision.

• I use my Mac a lot, and wanted something instantly which was going to work perfectly - With OF3 for Mac not coming out for a while, I didn’t want to get annoyed by the little discrepancies it currently has.

The downsides that I’ve found with Things3 are:

• Lack of community forum - But I’ve made a Discord server for people to discuss set ups etc, and it’s already over 30 people (in just over a day). However it’s still a long way away from what the Omni Group has here.

• Scalability - Whilst Things can cater for multiple projects and a large task library, I can see that OF3 will be better suited given it’s customisation, and the ability to hide work you don’t need. The reality is, I don’t think I’ll ever get to that point.

Thanks again for all of your comments, I’ll stick around the forum to see if I can learn any new bits about OF3!

deedubau · June 9, 2018, 2:29am

I feel like I used every major todo app on the app store since 2009, and I’m finally settling with Omnifocus 3. Omnifocus 1 and 2 gave me headaches, and I felt like I was configuring my tasks more than actually getting things done. I bought things 3 because it was gorgeous and extremely user friendly, but I don’t like the developer. You weren’t allowed to talk about the competition in their forums, and they shut it down because Things 3 was by years so it got pretty toxic. They took way too long to come out with cloud support with Things, and they do a poor job with updates and communicating with their community. For an example they told a user they had no plans to include picture attachments and didn’t tell them why, and another user said they have a 5k mac and the font is too small. Their page says they may include adjustable fonts in the future, and that the default size is fine for all modern macs.

I still bought their mac and ios apps because it’s probably the best UI i’ve seen since the app store launched, and I figure it would help me get more stuff accomplished because it’s so well made.Then Omnifocus 3 came out. The UI looks very similar to OF 2, but it feels a lot easier to use. I don’t use it much, but I like the picture attachments. I like how I can see a list of tags from every project without need to search for them. The custom perspectives is awesome because it goes straight to the type of tasks I want, kind of saved searches. This has the best filters i’ve ever seen for any todo app. I don’t use it much now, but location tasks seems really cool to remind you to do things when you get there. Finally Omnifocus has great communication with their users since version 1, and I didn’t mind buying the app even if I ended up dropping it shortly after, but I don’t think I will. Things is fine for managing tasks, but Omnifocus is an absolute powerhouse for managing your life. For anyone that manages a lot of tasks, I would imagine Omnifocus 3 is much better than Things 3 for the custom perspective features alone.

wilsonng · June 9, 2018, 2:34am

You can visit YouTube and see @eddiecoyote’s thoughtful videos about switching between OmniFocus and Things.

Video 1: Things 3 over OmniFocus 3 (beta) 23 minutes

Video 2: OmniFocus 3 (not beta) wins over Things 3 (43 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhDadc_lbzk

I love the headers in Things 3 and keyboard commands on the iPad edition. Wished OmniFocus groupings would have a more clear font that separates my groups. Otherwise, I’m happy with OF3.

sprclldr · June 9, 2018, 6:57am

The second video is actually very interesting.

It’s long, but it’s quite valuable because it is obviously a real-world setup. Most people who play with Things to see if it would work for them, do not have a lot of tasks entered in the system. But @eddiecoyote obviously has his entire setup in there, which gives you an accurate view of how it performs in a real situation.

For starters, it emphasizes how useful sequential projects are. And what’s more, it shows you Things 3 cannot handle this at all. There’s a strange thing going on where Things does not let you reorder tasks that have a Start Date. I’m actually really surprised by this because it makes the application unusable for me.

Imagine a project with 4 tasks for simplicity’s sake.

Create a paper
Confer with professor about paper. +1 month This can be done only in a month since the professor is on holiday.
Tweak paper
Submit paper

Now, Things 3 will hide task 2 under “Later” and display todo items 3 and 4 as available right now before task 2. But 3 and 4 can only be done after task 2 even becomes available. And as the video explains, the only work around would be to put artificial start dates on the remaining tasks.

And here’s the thing: in a sequential system, as soon as you mark task 2 complete, the remaining tasks will, one by one, appear. As they should. Even more interesting: suppose the professor is back early. Great, you adjust the date in OF, or mark it complete and the rest of the sequence still falls into place. In Things, you’d have to readjust every start date.

Now image that there are 15 items remaining instead of 2.

The video also shows what I highlighted as soon as Things 3 was released: headers are only visual separators. That’s it. You may say: so what’s the big deal? The big deal is you’re working on a hierarchy that doesn’t exist. As a result, you cannot hide, collapse, or play around at that level. That means a huge project is forever at the same level: (Area) > Project > Task > Checklist. And all headers are always visible leading to a cluttered view.

Another strange feature of Things is you cannot perform a system-wide search for a single tag. Tag searches are restricted to the current view. And there seems to be a huge bug where Things does not show the actual to do items when you search for a tag: the video shows that it is consistently not working.

For me the video, again, illustrates the key difference between Things and OmniFocus.

Things always wants to show you all of your stuff. Even if you cannot work on the tasks.
Things wants you to manually sift through everything all the time until you find stuff to do and triage it to an appropriate view. Filter by tag, go to upcoming view, search for this, star it for Today.

OmniFocus lets you focus on the stuff you can do right now in a view that shows you what’s relevant at this moment.

And @eddiecoyote actually sums it up beautifully:

Every time you stop and have to think for a second, that you can or cannot work on something, that takes a little bit of your cognitive power away. Some of your focus goes away.

wilsonng · June 9, 2018, 7:19am

Can you share the Discourse channel here? I’m curious.

That’s what I thought once upon a time…

My task list would be way too long under Things. I would be intimidated with having to scroll through several screens to find that one task. I use OF’s custom perspectives to shorted the list of tasks. The shorter the list, the more focus I attain to get work done. I cannot live in a task manager that doesn’t have smart lists or custom perspectives to narrow down my list. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cultured Code is trying to figure out how to fit smart lists (custom perspectives) into Things 3.

NickH · June 9, 2018, 10:56am

Sure - It’s https://discord.gg/jX36qgy. Would be great to get your input - We have a channel for “other apps”, so you might be able to field some OF3 questions there.

I watched Eddie’s videos last week (although he hadn’t made the most recent one where he found OF3 to be better for him than Things3).

I think he is a perfect example of someone who has quite a comprehensive task list, and is looking for those little extra features to really make one piece of software stand out. The fact he’s gone from OF, to Things, to OF, to things and back again, highlights the fact that both apps will do what 90% of the population want. It then comes down to personal preference, or needing one feature that the other app doesn’t have (be it sequential projects, headers, custom perspectives, UI etc).

@deedubau - You make an extremely valid point about CC - I remember the issues around cloud sync, the shocking development responses, and the non existent development of Things3 - It was the main reason I really wanted to make OF work (hence the investment in it before hand).

I’m hoping (fingers crossed), that CC have turned a corner now, because they seem to be pushing out updates (big updates), far quicker than ever before.

The lack of “community” spirit is still a negative, but maybe I can change that :D

Until my workflow gets more complex, I can’t ignore the pure gorgeousness of using Things3. But I absolutely see where the unique features of OF come into their own when more tasks and projects come along.

Hopefully both companies will push each other on and develop new features, whilst still keeping their unique charm.

deedubau · June 9, 2018, 9:15pm

Yeah I wouldn’t tell you to buy OF 3 if you already invested into things 3 unless you were gonna use the pro features and wanted pic attachments. I still might go back to things 3 myself. But that depends if I can figure out a way to hide future tasks which I can in OF 3, and I have a lot of tasks that can’t be started until a certain date. I know the GTD method says if anything is set to do in the future I think you put it on a calendar or something so I’ll have to look more into that.

Aeismail · July 1, 2018, 5:22pm

I’m one of those people who bounced back and forth between OF and Things for years, although about two years ago I kind of abandoned both for reasons not worth exploring here.

Recently, I had reason to return to task and project management and had to decide between the two. OF was the last one I had used before, but this was also slightly after the release of Things 3. I had been struggling with OF 2 because as much as I loved the app, it felt like it was causing me to overthink things—I was drilling down too much into individual details of projects rather than focusing on what would be a “reasonable” task. I don’t need to put “look up phone number of restaurant” or “look up Yelp reviews”; I just need “pick a restaurant for dinner on Friday” to organize me. Things 3 manages to make it easier for me to get that into the “books.”

However, the recent development cycle is actually somewhat concerning to me about OF relative to Things. Right now, everything in Things is being released simultaneously: updates to the iOS package show up at the same time as the desktop app. I’m concerned that there’s a three-month gap between the iOS and desktop OF 3 versions. That’s a lot of lag time to wait. I would have preferred if everything had come out simultaneously in a month or two rather than staggered releases where you have to wait for two different platforms to get the same features. Things 3 has also greatly accelerated its development cycle, with 6 minor point releases since last June.

But I’ve also found that both applications miss out on some features that would make my life a lot easier. The biggest of these is a template folder for projects that repeat a lot. I have a consistent workflow to follow every time, but I usually have several such tasks in different states of completion. Neither Things nor OF lets me store those as templates I can copy and reuse, and I don’t want to “duplicate” them because things can vary a bit and it’s not a simple duplicate.

So neither completely gets me where I want, but Things 3 fits where I am in my life for now. Maybe it’ll shift back later on but I’m OK for now.