Valhalla Island

I’m a Things user and I’ve never used OmniFocus. I’ve been happily satisfied with Things from the first day I started using it over six months ago. But even when I’m satisfied with a software solution there’s potential for something better, features I didn’t know I was missing but could make my life easier or make my enjoyment of a task greater. When you’re interested in systems for getting things done and just plain software in general, it’s impossible to ignore the hype around OmniFocus.

I’ve never used OmniFocus because it’s not an easy application to get into. It’s full of custom (ugly) UI widgets, small grey text on a white background, there’s varied colour, varied size, varied text spacing, the default set of data is messy and not easy to quickly read or understand. I call this kind of interface an intimidating interface and unless it’s necessary to learn and use the application, I’ll close it, maybe never to be opened again. OmniFocus doesn’t make me want to try it.

It’s important to know that everything said here is coming from a person that has not spent time using OmniFocus.

What I have done is read extensively and watched every OmniFocus screencast I could find. For me, I know what makes a great GTD application and I know exactly what I need and what I don’t want in a to-do app. One of the best articles is Matt Neuburg’s review at TidBITS and accompanying screencasts.

I’d go as far to say those two screencasts are the best user interface critique in a screencast I’ve ever seen, if not the best UI critique or simply just the best screencasts, fullstop. They’re to the point, illustrate those points beautifully and what’s happening is constantly explained with great sighs of frustration from Neuburg. Both are worth watching twice and also serve as a great argument against ever using non-standard interface elements.

Standard interface elements aren’t just great because they provide familiar functionality, work the way you’re used to them working and are tried and tested but they look better. OmniFocus is the ideal example of this. The calendar and combo box mentioned in the screencast are obvious but even more subtle details like the colour of the selection bar — rather than using blue or grey like every other Mac application, it’s a sickly orange colour and is much narrower than usual.

Some more unexpected behaviour is the function of command+N. Choosing what command+N does is a tough but I understand it to mean make a new instance of the main thing. The Finder’s thing is windows, command+N makes a new window, Photoshop’s thing is an image, command+N makes a new image, YoJimbo’s thing is notes, command+N makes a new note, you get the point. What’s OmniFocus’s thing? It’s is a library application which generally means they only need a single window, I’d say it’s tasks or actions as they call them. Yet hitting command+N opens a new OmniFocus window. Something I’d never want let alone need a common shortcut that should be used somewhere else for. Stupid.

Inspiration has obviously been David Allen’s Getting Things Done which is great, it’s what started the entire movement but it’s possible to take it too far, to the point of forcing users into a system that might not make complete sense inside an application. Calling tasks “actions” is the beginning, unless you’ve read Getting Things Done or watched the introduction screencast it’s not obvious that an action is actually a task stripped back to the minimum.

Sometimes it’s not about following the mantra word for word but picking and choosing details that best suit the situation or your sense of style. Ask any Christian. I agree that tasks need to be drilled down to individual actions — “complete assignment” is a useless to-do item but that doesn’t mean they need to be so explicitly called actions, a confusing name.

The most important thing for me in a GTD application is getting out of the way, it has to be very easy to get tasks in and get tasks out (marking them as complete). It shouldn’t force organisation or any style of task management. The default mode of a new project is sequential, which means tasks (actions) must be completed in order to complete the project as a whole. This would be fine but OmniFocus enforces this constraint, by default it’s impossible to mark any task that’s not the listed first under the project as complete. This is over-management and oppressive, even having to change that setting for each new project is more administration than I want to be doing.

The problem is being completely over-worked by OmniFocus. There’s a paragraph in the TidBITS article about the inspector window, something Omni applications seem to have great affection for:

In my opinion, the inspector window’s role is problematic here. The main window should express, somehow, everything important about every action; the inspector might function as a convenient secondary interface, but consultation of the inspector should never be required in order to know or do something.

The need for an inspector at all is a sign OmniFocus does too much and the fact it’s required to view for important information is a great example of how it forces the user to also do too much.