Moving from OmniFocus to Things
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This is exactly how I felt. I felt like my system was stagnant, and I felt like the whole thing was too heavy, too cumbersome to use effectively. I realized that I was getting the same bare minimum tasks done, but I had managed to build a system where a whole swath of tasks had been shunted into a limbo. Once a week, I “reviewed” them, which meant I glanced over the list, shrugged and moved on.
I decided to start over from scratch. I initially turned to Reminders, but that turned out to be too basic. I played with for a couple of months, but grew frustrated with the lack of flexibility. As a basic list of, well, reminders, it did great. As a task manager, it was way too limiting.
Then I found Things.
Reality Changes
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I had to temper my expectations for how I wanted Things to work. I wanted what I wanted from OmniFocus—a scripted list of what I needed to do next. Things stubbornly refused to give this to me. I got so frustrated that I felt like I had made a mistake, and thought maybe I should go back OmniFocus.
The problem was that I liked Things. I wanted Things to work because I wanted to use it. It’s just that nice.
what Things Was Not
I wanted Things to be like OmniFocus, because that’s what I was used to. I wanted Things to hide actions, or more appropriately, I wanted it to show me my next actions based on what time it was. With OmniFocus, I could assign not only a defer date but a defer time, and then the action wouldn’t show up until that time. This was the primary mechanism I was using to filter my list. I would basically program actions according to when I had scheduled them for the day.
This proved to be frustrating because I would then have two data points referring to the same thing, one in OmniFocus and one in Calendar. If I changed one, I would have to manually go and change the other. So then I stopped blocking time on the calendar, and just used OmniFocus to move things around. But that wasn’t really what I wanted.
What I’ve ended up with in Things is a list of everything that I’d like to get accomplished today. Each morning, I sort it into roughly the order I think things will happen. But the actual scheduling occurs on the calendar, a snapshot of which shows in the Today view in Things. Things led me to understand that actions and events are two different data points. I had a lot of redundant actions and events, like “Cook dinner”. Now, “Cook dinner” lives on the calendar, while actions like “prepare lasagna” live in Things.