Getting your focus with OmniFocus
One of my goals for 2008 is to get more organized — to accomplish the thing that I want to instead of forgetting about them when I can do them and then remembering them later when can’t do them.
I’ve flirted with GTD before and I really like it. The problem I had was that I didn’t have a great trusted source — I had one at work and (presumably) one at home. But I couldn’t come up with a great way to connect the two. And my source was Emacs with PlannerMode — which is wonderful, but didn’t quite cut everything that I wanted to do.
So I decided to try out OmniFocus just to see what it was like. And I’m blown away! The Omni Group is well-known for their high quality software but this one really takes the cake. OmniFocus stays out of the way until you want it. You can brain-dump your tasks and projects in with a keyboard shortcut and then organize them later. Marking tasks as finished is just that easy — use a checkmark!
My favorite feature is “add task by email” . Yep, I can think about something at work and use a delimiter to email that task or idea to myself at home. OmniFocus has a rule setup in Mail that searches for that delimiter and adds to to my tasks. Holy crap! That is cool!
To get an idea what it is like, I recommend going to the site and watching at least part of their Quick Start video (180MB Quicktime!). Seeing it in action and having someone explain it to you is better than reading through a manual
Oh, one more thing . . . OmniFocus is still in beta. Purchasing it now will costs $39.95. On January 8 it will cost $79.95. And I have had no problems with the beta, despite their daily updates to it!