I’m curious as to whether Omnigroup has any data re the the professions that make use of Omni Focus. From reading the forum it would seem that a great many users are developers, software engineers/designers and it would be interesting to know the percentage, if available. Of course, the forum might self-select for that… not sure… I’m contemplating an article about the historical development of task managers, pims etc, is why I’m wondering…
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I suspect that many of us have different roles that aren’t always associated with a profession or a job. So classifying anyone might be a difficult task.
My family has a retail gift shop. As the operations manager, I have various roles that my wife doesn’t take care of. I use OmniFocus to remind myself of all the repetitive admin tasks as well as the one-off actions for customer request.
Then as a father, I’m in charge of specific duties regarding the kids. Their school projects, after school activities (sports, fundraisers) suddenly become a part of my responsibilities.
As a husband, I have my “honey do” list. Yes, it’s “honey, do this” and “honey, do that.”
As a landlord of a few rental units and as a house owner, I have various renovations project and repetitive maintenance tasks that I need to track.
As a person with ADHD, I use OmniFocus as the crutch to keep my sanity.
OmniFocus or task manager users can have multiple roles that don’t fit neatly in a square box.
I don’t recall any survey where I had to give that kind of info to Omni Group. All we have is speculation from some of the users and what their professions are.
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Both from this forum and from others (Like Mac Power Users) I’d suggest it’s a lot more diverse than you think it is.
People on this forum either tend to be super power users of the app, or into the automation which would favour those of a technical mind. I work in Compliance with more than 13 years previously working in IT. I’ve seen Academics, Sales People, Project Managers…
For a Task Management system, it’s relatively high cost when you compare it against other task managers in the various App Stores. If you pay on a Monthly basis it’s comparable with other services.
Ignoring OmniFocus on the Web, it’s Apple Hardware only, i.e. higher cost hardware, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Knowledge workers were a considerable percentage of users.
Notice, I’m not saying that OmniFocus is expensive, rather it’s reassuringly costly and complete value for money for those using it’s features.
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Maybe go through episodes of the Omni show where guests are interviewed about how they use OmniFocus? That can give a hint about some of the user profiles.
The Learn OmniFocus YouTube channel will have a bunch of guests that explained their setup. That’s another avenue to take a peek at.
I reckon that the first 5 minutes of each episode where they introduce themselves will give you an idea of their profession.
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This is all very helpful. Thanks so much for your input. I’ll keep you posted. Best - JM
I’m a history professor at an American research university. In my role, I have a lot of things I need to do and a very flexible schedule: aside from 6 hours a week of scheduled classroom time, a few office hours, and meetings, most of my work is task-driven, not schedule-driven (though often with short deadlines). I think I learned about David Allen’s GTD from the academic blogosphere in the early 2000s.
For a while, I used a neat application called Life Balance (no longer around) to implement GTD. Then I discovered (probably from Merlin Mann) that Ethan Schoonover had created an implementation of GTD in OmniOutliner.
I started using that, and after OmniGroup realized that there was a market for the mashup, I signed on for early alpha builds of OmniFocus. It’s been interesting to watch how the application has evolved from those early versions in 2007 to the current robust task manager we have in 2025.
I got the impression from reading the first edition of Getting Things Done that the target audience was managers in industry and consulting, but I immediately saw the relevance of the GTD approach to academia. Others did, too; one early tester, Curt Clifton, left a tenured academic job to work on OmniFocus. (He’s now at Apple.)
I would be curious to know how many OF users are in higher ed, and how they found out about the app.
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What was Curtis’s field in academia?
Sorry I meant Clifton’s field in academia.
His bio says that at Rose-Hulman, he was in Computer Science and Software Engineering,
Another senior academic here (in engineering). I recall being introduced to GTD from early articles by James Fallows. Started with kGTD then migrated to OF when it started. I have had some brief flings with other apps, but always came back. The nature of being an academic is we always have multiple balls in the sir, for which OF is eminently suited. Looking at my current window, I have 35 active projects at the moment (though many do not have current tasks but are waiting for things to occur).
Continued thanks to all for this. @haas are you a software engineer or a chemical engineer or…
PS: Fallows review if Lotus Agenda was what got me into PKM
actually, environmental
