INTRO
So after playing around awhile with OmniFocus as my GTD/To Do list, I started to realize some of its shortcomings. Don't get me wrong, it's a great app, but one of the things I've always liked about the Franklin Covey system is the idea of urgency and importance, along with a "today's list". OmniFocus, while great at what it does, didn't seem to have this. Also, because of it's project/context mantra, it didn't seem all that flexible. Specifically, you couldn't assign two contexts to a project item which wouldn't allow me to do something like a task that was a phone call for real estate which meant that I couldn't view all my phone calls or all my real estate tasks. Enter Things.
FIRST LOOK
So initially, one of the major reasons I didn't go with Things was it's lack of support for multiple iCal calendars which I frequently use to keep as backup data. Well, I don't know if it was a lack of focus or what, but as it turns out, the iCal sync is actually better in Things for multiple calendars than OmniFocus. Here's why. First off, a limitation of OmniFocus is the ability to sync only contexts with calendars. At first, it seemed fine, until I noticed that over time, my iCal items were drifting outside of the calendar they should be in! For me, I like to group my projects into calendars! With Things, you can not only sync multiple iCal calendars, but you can filter synchronization by tags! By tagging each item with it's respective calendar name in iCal, each item gets synced properly. Now, it did take the extra step of ensuring that each item is tagged, but it ensures that it's synced right which is way more important to me. Fortunately, Things supports multiple tags, unlike OmniFocus' single context mentality! Lastly, my "Today's list" is back which means that I can get back to working the way I was taught in the Franklin Covey way!
PROJECTS/CONTEXTS vs. PROJECTS/AREAS/TAGS
There's a distinct difference between the way each one organizes it's to do list. With OmniFocus, it takes an approach where each item belongs to a "Project" and has a "Context". This rigidity is fine for the most part, but I found that Things is more flexible. As mentioned before, each item in OmniFocus can only have one context. In Things, each item can belong to an "Area of Responsibility" or a "Project" and then can have multiple tags assigned. In Things, most items will be in an "Area" unless it's part of a process/project, in which case it would belong to a "Project". Then, like OmniFocus, you can add a "Context", or in the case of Things, a tag, or multiple tags! The big downfall with "Projects" in Things is that you can't schedule individual items within a "Project". You can however assign due dates to the entire "Project" and schedule reminders for the entire "Project". It seems like an awkward limitation, but so far, I've been able to do what I want within this construct. Lastly, you can even delegate individual items and "Projects" to "People" which is a great feature! In OmniFocus, you could create a separate context for each delegate, but because you're limited to a single context, you would loose the ability to filter if it was a phone call vs. e-mail, etc.
IPHONE CLIENT
The iPhone client for Things is very fast and works very intuitively. The only real drawback is it's lack of support for Things' "Areas of Responsibility". It's not necessarily a show stopper, but it seems odd that they put the functionality into the desktop client without implementing it on the iPhone client. Toss in the fact that you can schedule individual tasks within "Areas" which you can't do in "Projects" and it makes it that much more complicated! Hopefully they address this soon! Syncing in Things is pretty straightforward and is actually easier to setup than OmniFocus, but neither is difficult at all.
OVERALL
While the simplicity and flexibility of Things appeals to me, OmniFocus does have more bells and whistles including being able to set whether items are sequential, parallel, or individual. Also, OmniFocus tends to be more stable, although it didn't quite sync right with iCal after awhile, and certainly has more maturity than Things. That said, I think I'm going to stay with Things for now since it does work more to the way I'm used to than OmniFocus. A special thanks to Stefan Groschupf who supplied me with an excellent AppleScript to move all my to do's from OmniFocus to Things!
