This weekend, I agent-coded a two-way sync between Linear and my favorite task manager. Now all my work tasks live in our company’s project manager, but I can use a fast, local UI to work through them.
I’ve wanted these to play well together for ages. This feels magical.
It’s about time for the annual attempt to migrate from OmniFocus to Reminders, which will probably fail spectacularly, as usual, reminding me (heh) why I’m glued to OF in the first place.
This is practically doomed and yet the season seems to demand the token effort.
Although I’ve trusted OmniFocus for years, I’m still compelled to try out the alternatives sometimes. This time I wanted to see what the new Sequoia Reminders app with calendar integration was like. It’s so pretty!
Today I discovered that it also silently mutates some of my tasks, like removing the URLs from them so I can’t click straight from the task to the thing I need to do, or removing their repeat settings so that they become one-and-done.
Yikes, no. Back to OmniFocus, yet again.
I used DEVONthink for many years to store, organize, and search all of my personal information. Nothing else came close to its wide variety of pro-level data management features when I started with it. However, times change. While DEVONthink continually improves, so do its alternatives. For my needs today it’s a complicated, expensive tool that’s no longer worth the extra effort and expense over other products.
I recently realized I hadn’t launched DEVONthink in months. When I tried to, I remembered that I was out of licenses for it. DEVONthink is licensed by the number of computers you want to use it on. By a quirk of fate, I own or personally operate 4 Macs:
I’m the only person who uses these computers. Because of DEVONthink’s weird licensing scheme, my $199 Pro license makes me pick and choose which 2 I want to be allowed to use. I could pay another $198 to use my other 2, oooorrrr I could switch to another system. That was the kick in the pants I needed to investigate the options.
I ended up following the Unix philosophy of selecting well-crafted single-purpose tools for each of DEVONthink’s features. If I decide to replace one of them, I can swap something else in while I keep using all the others.
I configured DEVONthink to sync my documents with iCloud, including to DEVONthink’s separate $50 iPhone and iPad app. Therefore iCloud Drive was the easy choice for storing all my information and syncing it across my devices. This cost nothing extra since I was already paying for it.
I use the Johnny Decimal system to assign each of my documents to the right folder. The closest thing to that collection of folders in DEVONthink is that same collection of folders in iCloud Drive.
Now I use Hazel instead of DEVONthink’s “classify” feature for automatically sending files to the right place. Cost: $42, or $20 for an upgrade. (New major versions come out about every 4 years, so the upgrade price is about $5 per year.)
DEVONthink has a fantastic search tool. So does HoudahSpot. I set up a global keyboard shortcut to open its search window no matter which app I’m currently using. HoudahSpot also searches locations like network drives and USB devices without indexing them in advance. Cost: $34, or $19 for an upgrade. (New major versions come out about every 3 years, so the upgrade price is about $6 per year.)
DEVONthink has limited support for taking Markdown notes. I tried using it as my catch-all notes app but kept coming back to iA Writer. It’s much better for writing, linking between notes, publishing to various online services, and as of recently automating my workflows with Shortcuts. I don’t count Writer’s one-time $50 purchase price in my total because, like iCloud, I was paying for it anyway.
Aside: If your workflows are centered around Markdown, get Marked 2 while you’re at it. Thank me later.
DEVONthink has mechanisms to link related objects together. Hookmark (which I’ve written about before) can make links between just about anything. I used it instead of DEVONthink’s features. Cost: $70 for the 1st year then $35 per year.
I appreciate DEVONthink’s powerful features. However, other tools caught up with or surpassed it to the point that I had been using it as one part of a broader system:
Now I’m using:
DEVONthink is better than any of those individual parts, but each of those individual parts is better at the one thing they do than DEVONthink is. Hazel is a better organizer. HoudahSpot is a better searcher. iA Writer and Hookmark are better for writing and linking. And while the end goal of this wasn’t directly to save money, as I’m not allergic to spending money on things that make my life better, DEVONthink’s sticker shock is what nudged me into action. It’s a happy result to end up with a more powerful, flexible system that’s cheaper to maintain.
DEVONthink’s been good to me. It helped me collect and organize all the information I use in my personal and professional lives. Still, its alternatives got better and learned to play well with each other. Now it’s an overly expensive tool that’s less good at addressing my needs than the cheaper, better tools that replaced it.
I wish OmniFocus would replace the way its Forecast view selects items to display with a user-selectable perspective. Then I could make my own choices about what to include, and OmniFocus would display those items in its handy integrated view alongside calendar events.
I can’t make those choices today. For example, the Forecast view doesn’t allow me to include actions that have a defer date in the past. That is, once an action is past its “start date” and available to be worked on, it no longer shows up on Forecast’s Today tab, or even in the Past tab. This is all the configuration available to decide what the Forecast view should show:
That’s one place I think Things is better than OmniFocus: If I have an action like “pay the rent (after the 20th of the month)”, the Things Today view will still show that action as something I could and should be doing on the 22nd of the month.
Purists might argue that I’m using OmniFocus wrong. I shouldn’t be leaning on the Forecast view at all, but should be regularly checking my tags and projects to see what I should be doing. That workflow isn’t the right fit for me. I know. I’ve tried it many times. What does work is a nice Today view that shows all my available scheduled actions in one place, along with actions I’ve tagged with “Today” during a review. I have a personal items perspective like that which ends up looking much like Things if I squint at it the right way:
Notice that the Forecast configuration looks an awful lot like a pared-down version of a regular perspective. If I had a magic wand to wave, I’d remove the “Items” checkboxes from the “In Forecast, include” and “Today includes” sections and replace them with the name of the perspective that would select all the items I wanted to show on the Forecast. Ta-da, done. Then I could customize the Forecast to make it perfect for my own needs. Others could make their own perspective, or use a default that OmniGroup could include to emulate the current behavior. Alternatively, a perspective could gain a “Display as Forecast” checkbox where I could have multiple Forecasts, each with its own filtered view of items. Tell me a separate “Personal Forecast” and “Work Forecast” view doesn’t sound nice. Imagine that you could associate each one with the appropriate focus filter so that they show up automatically when you’re doing personal or work things on your computer. The heart flutters!
Please consider this, Omni Group. OmniFocus is powerfully customizable in so many ways! I’d be delighted if this one last set-in-stone limitation were removed.
I know I said I’m using Things to manage all the things I need to do, but I’ve switched back to the OmniFocus 4 beta.
I like Things. It’s pretty and ergonomic. That matters in something you’ll spend so much time with. For the most part, I like using Things more than I do OmniFocus, which isn’t exactly beautiful to look at. OmniFocus does everything right where it matters, though.
First, Things lacks end-to-end encryption. That by itself should be a deal-breaker for me. I tried to overlook it because I wanted Things to be my ideal to-do app, but I just can’t. I think the Cultured Code gang are great people. They have a long track record of treating their users well. I have no reason to think that will change. I strongly doubt they’re going through my boring to-do items, but it’s at least technically possible, and I hate that I have to trust any company’s good intentions. Even if I think they’re good people, my employer may not appreciate me storing sensitive information in an unencrypted vendor database. Even more, my wife’s a doctor, so HIPAA implies she can’t use Things at all for her work unless she keeps all her actions so vague as to be useless. If she put an item in there like “Call Joe Smith back”, she could be sued and/or fined for storing personal healthcare information in an insecure location. In contrast, OmniFocus lets you set an encryption password on your data. Then The Omni Group can’t access your information even if they want to. If you don’t trust Omni’s sync server, you can sync it with your own WebDAV server.
Second, Things’s search field requires you to type exactly what you’re looking for. If I have an item named “Do foo and bar”, searching Things for “foo bar” won’t find it. OmniFocus will. That’s bitten me more times than I’d like, usually when I can almost (but not quite) remember how I phrased a task. Sure, I could just type “foo” into Things and then scroll through the results into I see “bar”. I bought a to-do app to offload that mental grunt work.
Finally, it shouldn’t bother me so much that I can’t check off a repeated task in Things before its start date. It does. It bothers me a lot. I put everything in my to-do app, including tasks like “text my distant friend, Joe, every month”. If he and I talk today, and I’m going through my weekly review tomorrow, it’d be nice to mark that as done even though I’m not “scheduled” to chat with him for another 3 weeks. Things won’t let me unless I’m willing to dig into the task’s repeat settings. OmniFocus doesn’t care. It’s like “Oh, you’re done early? Cool. I’ll remind you in a month!” Things users have been requesting this ability for years.
I’m back to OmniFocus. It’s not as pretty to look at, but it does everything I ask of it. I wish it had Things’s gorgeous interface, and I miss being able to add sections and notes to projects, but I won’t trade encryption, better search, and smartly repeating tasks for those features.
I have a note to myself: stop looking for a better task manager than OmniFocus. While it won’t win a beauty pageant, it’s the best app for helping me get things done.
I use the Things task manager to keep track of what I need to do. I use the Focus pomodoro timer to help myself focus on a task that I’m actively working on.
Focus integrates well with another task manager, OmniFocus: you can drag an action from OmniFocus into Focus to create a task to work on, and that task will have a button that links back to the original OmniFocus action. Super convenient! It doesn’t play well with Things, though. If you try the same process, you’ll end up with multiple separate actions for each of the Things to-do’s various properties.
For example, this to-do has the title, note, checklist, tags, when, and deadline options filled in:
Dragging it to Focus creates a whole mess of random tasks:
That’s not helpful. We can do better.
First, I wrote a shortcut using Things’s shiny new Shortcuts actions. For each to-do currently selected in Things, it uses Focus’s URL scheme to create a Focus task with the item’s title, notes, and due date, and a link back to the item in Things.
Second, I made a Keyboard Maestro hot key macro, available only in Things, that executes my shortcut. When I select the to-do item above and press “option-F”, I get one single task with all the details set:
If I click the link icon next to the task’s title, Things opens with that to-do selected.
Ta-da! The workflow is slightly different than with OmniFocus, but only a little bit, and the result is just as useful.
I recently wrote about switching from OmniFocus to Reminders and gave a lot of reasons why I thought that was a good plan. I was wrong and I’ve since moved back.
Apple has made Reminders into a solid app with a lot of nice features, but I realized I’ve been taking OmniFocus for granted. First, I sorely missed its “defer dates”. That is, I don’t need to be reminded to buy Halloween candy when it’s nearly Christmas time. I don’t even want to see that on my action list because it clutters up both my list and my thinking. Second, you can set OmniFocus to repeat an action a certain amount of time after that action’s completion date, not only its due date. “Pay the electric bill” needs to happen at the same time each month, but “make a haircut appointment” should happen a few weeks after my last haircut, whenever that was. Finally, OmniFocus’s project options like “complete with last action” are unmatched. Mix in many less crucial but nice-to-have features like nested tags, and per-tag location reminders, and it’s too good to walk away from.
I started moving my actions back out of Reminders and into OmniFocus and switched to using the OF 4 beta on my iPhone and iPad. That beta is turning into what I’d hoped OmniFocus would become: a stunning app that’s a pleasure to use. If it follows this current path, and OmniFocus 4 for Mac follows soon after, I think it’ll be amazing.
I’m glad I tried this experiment, and if nothing else it forced me to deeply review all of my actions before copying them from one system into another. Apple should be proud of Reminders and I bet it does everything most people need. It’s not (yet) enough for me, though. Until then, OmniFocus, I’m back.
I’ve written before about Hook, a nifty way of linking things you’re working on together so you can seamlessly bounce between them. I’ve thoroughly integrated it into my workflow now and adore how quickly I can jump from one document to another — in a different app, even — without ever looking away from my work. It helps me reach and maintain a state of flow.
Hook depends on an app’s ability to support deep linking to its contents. Many apps are helpful, like OmniFocus. It supports both a right-click “Copy as Link” action to all sorts of items, and allowing other apps to ask it for a link to its currently selected item. Consequently, Hook’s OmniFocus support is top-tier, and I can make links between a to-do item and the website that documents how to do it. Other apps are less helpful, like Apple’s own Reminders app which supports neither users nor other apps asking for a direct link to an item. It somewhat supports drag-and-drop linking to other apps, but that’s not nearly so convenient and powerful as OmniFocus’s methods.
Apps should be more like OmniFocus than Reminders. To that end, Hook’s author Luc P. Beaudoin collaborated with an all-star list of Apple software developers to write the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, which says in part:
We affirm that the ability to copy a link to a resource is as important for cognitive productivity as the ability to copy other types of information. This applies to all persistent digital information.
We invite software developers to do their part, by
- ensuring their users can conveniently obtain a link to the currently open or selected resource via a user interface; and
- providing an application programming interface (API) to obtain or construct a link to that resource (i.e., to get its address and name).
I could not agree with this, or endorse it, more heartily. Anyone can write an app that locks away content behind its own twisty maze of navigation links. The best and most powerful applications open themselves to users. Today I can link from an OmniFocus action to a DEVONthink document, and from there to an Obsidian note, whether on my Mac or my phone or iPad. Tomorrow, I want to go directly into any of my apps. If you’re an Apple developer, please take the time to read and consider this manifesto.
My wife’s been a Mac user much longer than I have. Years after she’d been happily using an iMac G4, a family friend asked if I’d like a bargain deal on their unused eMac. I was hooked. I’d recently learned about Getting Things Done (aka GTD) and wanted to try that on my new computer. At the time, on that OS, for Serious Users, that meant adopting either Things or OmniFocus. Then, as now, Things was the prettier choice. However, I had come to Mac OS after years on a Linux desktop and I knew that looks weren’t everything. I bought OF after a short trial period and I was off to the races.
It’s fair to say that OmniFocus changed my life. I’d been a disorganized mess who was constantly forgetting what I was supposed to be doing, and was often paralyzed when faced with too many choices of what I could be working on next. With my new OF/GTD system, I started taming that and getting my life in order. OmniFocus was one of the earliest purchases for my first iPhone. When I later got an iPad, I gulped at the price and then bought OF for it, too. When OmniFocus 2 came out, I bought an upgrade on launch day. When OmniFocus 3 came out, I did the same.
And when the OmniFocus 4 pre-beta became available for iOS, I installed it immediately. This time, though, something was different. Well, not with OF itself. That was the problem. OF 4 looked a lot like OF 3, which was pretty similar to OF 2, which closely resembled OF 1. Sure, The Omni Group had done a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes work over the years. It was and is a brilliant product for power users. Yet sometimes even power users want something simple, and although OmniFocus scales up wonderfully, it never scaled down. Its industrial grade user interface would be instantly familiar to a user from 2008, with a hundred available options to tweak every last little detail. I realized that my own needs weren’t that incredibly complex and became curious whether maybe another app would be able to tell me to schedule a haircut.
Meanwhile, Apple’s own Reminders app had started life as a severely underpowered afterthought compared to OmniFocus, Things, and other powerhouses. In iOS 14, it hit adolescence and sprouted new features that started to hold their own against commercial alternatives. In iOS 15, it went through another growth spurt into something that started to look feasible. I found a blog post from Jon Mitchell about someone in my situation who had made the leap from OmniFocus to Reminders. That sounded implausible and drastic but it gave me the nudge to try the experiment for myself.
It worked. There are a few features from OmniFocus that I miss, like defer dates, perspectives, and “repeat from date of completion”, but those turned out not to be that important. And in exchange, I got a lot of nice benefits:
Since beginning that test, I found myself moving more actions from OmniFocus to Reminders. One day I noticed that there weren’t many actions left in OF anymore, and I sat down to move over the few stragglers. Wow. I’d been at inbox zero many times, but never at actions zero in over a decade of using OmniFocus. And then I did the previously unthinkable: I deleted OF from my iPhone and iPad. I’ve fully committed to a life managed by what used to look like a toy to me. Over the last couple of months, it’s been fine. I still miss the advanced features I mentioned earlier, but not enough to be tempted to go back. Again, my life isn’t so complex that I need an extremely powerful tool to organize it. I’m learning that something simple and fun to use is good enough for me.
I still adore OmniFocus and I can imagine a world where I’d switch back. Maybe Apple will grow bored with developing Reminders and never improve it over today’s state, which is good but far from perfect. Perhaps OmniFocus 4 will be released as an absolutely stunning app that’s a pleasure to use. However, I think I’ll stick with Reminders for now. It’s helping me Get Things Done, and that’s what matters.
