I have a vision of myself without the support of OmniFocus. I’d be wandering around in a semi-permanent state of confusion, wondering what the heck I should be doing with my time and trying to keep all the ‘to-do’s’ of my life active and remembered in my brain. The stress of it all would be horrible!

Instead, I have OmniFocus. This application acts as my external brain, keeping all my various projects and tasks ordered, across all my areas of responsibility. It syncs across my Mac, iPhone and iPad so that I can know what I should (and can) do at any point in time. It keeps me on track with my work, bringing up tasks to do at the right time, and keeping them out of my sight when there’s nothing I can do to move the project forward.

I have been on the OmniFocus bandwagon for years, but I’ve been on the “Getting Things Done” bandwagon for even longer. I think I started using that way of managing my work in about 2003. Now, I can’t imagine working, living or thinking about my stuff to be done in any other way.

I have been an active user of OmniFocus since before it was OmniFocus, and was instead just a user-generated add-on for OmniOutliner. The app is just so fantastic to use. Of course, it does have it’s foibles, and the biggest problem is aligned with the biggest problem of GTD in general these days, which is ubiquitous context. When GTD was developed, you went to your office to handle paperwork, and your computer desk to ‘do email’. Smartphones hadn’t been invented and if you wanted to sync data, it probably involved a serial cable between your computer and your Palm Pilot.

This created physical barriers that prevented you from doing stuff, which the methodology termed context. (Un)fortunately, now we can pretty much do anything anywhere, rendering the concept of context almost obsolete. While people have tried to use other axes such as energy or mindset, there’s nothing as good as the essentially redundant physical context. OmniFocus, for better or worse, continues to cling to that context mode.

Nevertheless, that can be worked around, and it still offers a fantastic view of your life in task form. Look at what’s urgent, look at what you can do now, look at what you are waiting on to be able to progress - it can slice and dice your tasks in any way you need.

I couldn’t live without it. I don’t want to live without it. I don’t want to have to keep all my thoughts juggled in my head - that’s crazy! My brain is for value-adding, not remembering stuff!