Solid but needs an update – OmniFocus 2 Review

I’ve been using Omnifocus exclusively for close to 3 years on iOS, and about a year and a half ago added the desktop app. It’s an extremely powerful program, one of a kind really, but I’ve recently switched to Things 3 for the following reasons: 1. Just too many taps to add a task. Easy enough to add to the inbox, but to actually set a due time, the iOS version still uses that old scroll wheel for setting the date. To compare, Things 3 has a small calendar icon which when pressed pops up a view of the current month, where you can then just select the date. So much smoother and easier. 2. Changing the order of tasks I want to accomplish for that day. Maybe other i people don’t work this way, but when planning my day I like to list tasks in the order that I plan to work on them. In Things 3 you can just long-press on a given task and reorder as you would like. The only way I’ve seen to accomplish the same in OF is to actually assign a time to each task (again just too many clicks, etc). I had actually emailed OF support about this soon after they released v2. As usual they were very responsive but just said that it was a feature that they would consider. 3. When Omni released version 2 with the new “Forecast” view, I thought it was amazing and this feature alone was enough to keep me using OF. However the “Upcoming” view in Things 3 is just more usable to me as it has more data on a single screen. Also it allows me to take a longer look into the future while “Forecast” only shows the next 5 days or so, and to see the details of on of these five days you have to click on that day (of course). In summary, there are still several things that OF does better than Things. For example, OF perspectives certainly provide more power. However, I think you can go overboard in setting a lot of this stuff up, to the point that you’re spending too much time managing your to do software rather than actually knocking stuff out. The tags in Things provide more than enough for what I truly need when it comes to creating custom perspectives/views. It was a difficult decision for me to switch, because I have so much respect for Omnifocus and what it does, but in the end the streamlined usability and ample power of Things 3 was enough. I will be keeping my eye on OF however to see how they continue to develop.
Review by cmhall8 on OmniFocus 2.