Review: OmniFocus

Overview: A complicated task management program that is made for fans of the “Getting Things Done” approach to organizing daily activities and collective projects. It can be effective, but is not easy to use.

Functionality: This app was modeled after author and management consultant David Allen’s approach to organizing daily responsibilities, increasing efficiency and reducing stress. Unfortunately, the app is complicated and difficult to master, but more on that later. The GTD concept involves breaking endeavors down into individual actions, which isn’t a bad idea and is probably something that you have done before. Let’s say you need to clean up your house. This is quite a vague task and seems like it could be broken down into multiple actions to help you focus and tackle activities one at a time. You could rearrange furniture, vacuum, wipe surfaces, organize clutter into shelves and on and on. These are all individual activities that a user would input into OmniFocus. Each item could then be organized into “projects.” In this case, our project would be “clean the house.”

Users can also assign a “context” to each action or project. This means that you can label the item depending on where you would likely deal with it or what type of task it is. In our “clean the house” project, the context would likely be “Home,” but we could have made different contexts for different projects, like for an action titled “call mom,” I might create the context “car.” Here is where OmniFocus gets interesting. Let’s say I was in the car and I knew there was something that I needed to be doing instead of listening to OneRepublic’s “Stop & Stare” on repeat. I could open the app and go to Contexts>Car to see a list of activities that I had wanted to take care of while driving (probably not the best context for planning most actions, but ideal for getting obligatory phone calls out of the way).

The app also allows you to mark locations via your iPhone’s GPS capabilities. So if you’re in transit and want to figure out if there is any thing that you could be doing with your life right now, you could check for nearby contexts to see if there is anything that you could take care of. Lo and behold, you’re near your bank! A task related to the bank might allow you to unexpectedly deal with errands and be productive in time that would have otherwise been wasted. Review: In my view, task management apps are supposed to be easy to use and time efficient. This app was counterintuitive and time consuming. I have to admit, I was not familiar with the GTD approach before using this app, but my friend had read David Allen’s book and knew the concepts well. After looking at the application and its unwieldy system of inputting and organizing tasks, he said: “this is almost counterproductive.” I spent an intensive 30 minutes basically begging the app to do what I wanted it to do and in the end I had to turn to a 10-minute video tutorial. After all of that, it turned out that the app couldn’t give me a quick way to list, organize, group and view a set of new actions but that the desktop client could. That is a setback for something that is supposed to be an efficient organizational tool for your iPhone. You’re not supposed to have to sit at a computer to get efficiency with an iPhone app, you’re supposed to have that ability while you're mobile. After becoming familiar with the app and its awkward system, it can be effective, but you shouldn’t have to become a fast user of the app to make it useful. It should be useful and quick from the beginning. I will say that the contexts are a great idea and that using the iPhone to mark locations was a very innovative development. It makes the application useful in ways that others are not. And if you’re a GTD veteran, this capability might do a lot in helping you to… uh… get things done. At the same time, the interface is limiting and I found the desktop client to be far more useful and superior for viewing and organizing tasks. That may seem obviously acceptable, but the goal here is to increase your efficiency on the go, not at your computer. You should be able to easily input new tasks and look up others when you need to remember them, especially for $19.99. Summary: Those familiar with GTD may find this to be a godsend and others may learn to love it. It has some great features and potential, but it is not smooth enough, efficient enough or easy enough to warrant the price tag at this point. There is definitely room for improvement.

Related articles