Regarding Liz’s comment, the standard GTD wisdom is that dates apply to projects and the waiting for list. All other date- or time-sensitive action or information should be in your calendar. About the repeating action, I wonder whether a list-management tool like OF is the right place for it. Most people use their calendars for this, either repeating appointments, or time blocks. Just my 2c!

When OF finally makes its way to me (with my luck, the day before its official release), I’m going to be starting from scratch without doing an import. I’ve got enough stale tasks sitting around that it’s a good excuse to sit down and do a total review, cutting and pasting between kGTD and OF. I do the same when I buy a new computer rather than simply importing everythiong from my old system.

Maybe it’s just an anal thang…

@Barry et al.: No, I have no problem at all talking about iGTD. I actually like it a lot:

http://www.43folders.com/2007/04/08/igtd-quicksilver/

In general? In the interest of my sanity (and in maintaining a reasonable signal to noise ratio) I don’t try to cover every GTD app for the Mac that comes out any more (and there are a LOT of ‘em these days). I do look at most of them at least twice, and then try to focus on the ones I consider the strongest. Totally subjective, I’m afraid. Thank God there’s about 5,000 other tip-shoveling “life hack” sites who can help pick up the slack. ;-)

But yeah, FWIW, I think iGTD looks really swell. And you can’t beat the price.

Also, I’ll let the cat out of the bag just a bit to say 43f has a nice treat coming soon for fans of iGTD. So stay tuned.

Oh, also, please don’t worry about hurting my feelings if OF doesn’t work for you, either in theory or practice. Seriously. But conversely I hope I can be forgiven for not being importuned into “selling” OF over any other tool. It’s a weirdly personal decision, this stuff, and there’s no right answer for all folks, all the time. It’s like arguing over condiments.

That said, I’ve selfishly tried to push every feature that I need into OmniFocus, as has, if I may say, Mr. Schoonover. We’ve held our positions in innumerable (innumerable!) friendly Talmudic debates over GTD and not-GTD, and so far, for myself, I’m pretty happy with where things are headed.

Finally, if you have feedback of any kind for the OmniGroup folks, you totally should share it with them. It’s hard for me to imagine a group of people that’s more open and responsive to what their users ask for. It’s actually kind of astounding to watch. I could never be that good a listener. :-)

(Disclosure: I like OG, I contribute to the project, they’re friends of mine, etc., etc., YMMV)

good points as usually

The problem with starting from scratch is that there are so many systems out there that require you to REstart from scratch. In the end, you feel like you’ve accomplished nothing at all.

I’m not criticising Omnifocus, I love the company, but if they want to make something really useful it would be something like an importer from existing apps and an easy exporter to other apps. After all, one of the the core-principles of productivity is efficiency. So far, that’s a quality that I’ve missed in all current productivity-apps.

I’m using iGTD. It works alright, and new features are coming out. I really like the Omni products I’ve used, though, and would consider switching. How is OmniFocus different from / better than iGTD?

Merlin:

I’m glad to be somewhere in the queue for OmniFocus, sounds like a great product. Over the last few months I’ve been happily using iGTD. Can you take a few minutes to compare/contrast based on your experience with both.

Greg

Have you looked at iGTD from a very clever programmer? And now it is free.

http://bargiel.home.pl/iGTD/

I believe it is much better than Ethan’s scripts or the look and feel of OmniOutliner Professioinal.

Taxonomy : Somewhat a critique to Schoonover’s way of organizing things? I’ve seen the screencasts and I got to say that he has a “lot” of folders in his projects pane.

For the people like me, who does not have the oportunity of testing OmniFocus (I would love to like I tested OO3), I hope you talk a little about printing to index cards, and how to set up a system just based to be synced with index cards (I mean, physically and in the mind). I think that the index card thing is successfull because it is a way of thinking.

I got always an index card on my desk showing me just my today actions, or actions for a specifical context (for example @calls and @email). This is just so good because it’s like an abstraction of what you can do and got to do in a certain time. Index cards help to having always the “big picture” of whatever you got to do. When I use apps like iGTD or kGTD, I just feel lost between a flow of information and the system itself overwhelms me.

A feature I would like to see, finally, is keyboard strokes… for example “c+” (like in Google Reader for labels), a way of fast switching to a context to another, and so, having fast knowledge of your contexts and next actions. Maybe some kind of script like “export context to sticky note”, who passes for example your “@calls” to a Stickies note, would be nice for achieving what I described as an index card way of thinking and acting. The idea is how to pass from complexity (a GTD system must support complexity) to simplicity, because I’m a little bit persuaded that human brain acts always simple.