I’ve tried them all, and Things is the one for me.

I used OmniFocus for a couple of months. I really wanted to like it, but despite having a great company behind it, it’s rigid, unintuitive, and unattractive.

iGTD’s UI is an utter mess, and Midnight Inbox is extremely buggy.

I think Things is poised to become the new “it” GTD app. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, now. It allows for structure, while simultaneously allowing for flexibility. It doesn’t force either upon you (which unfortunately is not the case with OmniFocus).

Things is gorgeous, intuitive, and deceptively simple. It’s not even in beta, yet, and I’m already sold. They’ve been candid about their immediate plans for it, and I’m satisfied. I migrated everything out of OmniFocus and into Things.

(Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Cultured Code in any way. I’ll be paying for Things, like everyone else.)

Also, I don’t dislike Omni — not at all. They’re good folks who make great software, but OmniFocus simply doesn’t meet my needs.) I gave it the old, college try, but its approach is too rigid for me and has too many “rules.” OmniFocus felt like a babysitter; it’s her way, or not at all…. Then I found Things: Gentle structure, but equally flexible. The Cultured Code guys really “get it.” To me, Things is “GTD for grownups.”

OmniForgotten.

I only downloaded Things earlier today, but already I’m impressed. It was easy to set up my projects and tasks (as in, almost no time at all), and though it’s still in alpha it’s completely useable, if currently lacking some features (and most of these are promised soon).

It’s certainly the most natural GTD software implementation I’ve come across. Like the previous poster, I tried OmniFocus and iGTD, finding the latter a disaster to use and the former too structured. It felt as though I had to jump through its hoops before I could enter my tasks (maybe that was the intention).

Things, on the other hand, has that clean UI feel and I found it didn’t take long to work out what went where. The distinction between Areas and Projects is a little blurred, though, and this might be problematic. The use of tags instead of context categories that can’t be ignored is a touch that makes it more flexible, and less imposing. For the GTDer, the Someday and Postpone categories are a nice feature (lacking with such clarity in other apps, I might add).

In short, Things is the first GTD app I’ve come across that actually makes me want to do my tasks (is that a little geeky?). It’s by no means perfect, but I’m looking forward to future improvements.

I have to agree with the previous two posts. As an alpha tester of Omnifocus for the last 2 months Ive grown sadly distant from a program that promised so much. To be fair, it delivers a lot of what it promised, but the implementation leaves little to inspire. And i need inspiration, not simply rules or guidelines. Within 24 hours of getting hold of Things, I’ve switched over my tasks and almost immediately - and unexpectedly - got back to my work as opposed to continuing to configure the program.

Perhaps after 2 months of of Things I´ll be surfing the highway in search of the next golden chalice, but I don’t know, what I’ve come to realise is that I want a program that doesn’t need a manual, does what I want it to, and then gets outs of the way. It sort of digitally withers away until next needed. And that’s a great relief after constantly partnering up the old contenders of iGTD, Inbox etc. Anyway, back to work.

Just to let everyone know, Things is now being released to the public. You can download it from http://culturedcode.com/things/

W.

i have to agree. have used both. things.app is let’s say, aristotle versus plato. Less rigid, more subjective. and it seems to help productivity etc. Very cool division of screen into ‘actual’ GTD major categories: Collect, Focus and Organize (and Projects versus Areas). Lots of nice touches like this make things.app edge out omnifocus. I used omnifocus and yes it is better than let’s say, Outlook, BUT things.app seems more pure. I vote for it as most likely David Allen’s favorite gtd program. Anyone? Bueller?

Yep, simplicity in this case wins out. Things allows you as the user to control how you want to manage your tasks. The problem I see with OmniFocus and Midnight Inbox and them is they are designed as applications that strictly implement a task management framework. Things on the other hand is more of a loosely defined set of guidelines, based off a task management framework. I however, recently discovered Sandy (iwantsandy.com) and have quickly migrated out of Things and into Sandy. The natural language and the real time reminders has me totally hooked.

I love Things.app. I found many of the same observations about Omni Focus, and ended up switching everything over- Things is that good.

I, too, was initially confused about the use of “Areas” in things, but I got some clarification from the wonderfully responsive staff at Cultured Code. Areas can contain both single tasks and projects, thus they are an additional level of hierarchical organization to help you separate, for example, work and home, or several hats that you must wear at once.

Tags are non-hierarchical and can be very flexible, but Things.app reasons that you could get too many at once, so Areas takes some of the heat off your tagging system.

One shortcoming of Areas currently (1/28) is that the easiest ways to assign them require you to drag a mouse to drop things or to move around in dialog boxes. Additionally, you can’t assign a task to more than one area (eg. I have buy life insurance under both “money” and “family” areas.) Currently, you can’t filter things by area in the different focuses (today, next, etc), but they are sorted by area. You also can’t collapse the Area headings.

I have found that I can use the Areas concept just by assigning a hierarchy of Tags for each area (Areas/home:work:etc), and all these problems go away. The hierarchical tags also takes some of the visual heat off the tagging system, and I get out the behavior I find most intuitive for areas.

They mention in their wiki that the visual representation of Areas isn’t set in stone, so some of this could change before the Beta is released.

I have to agree. After trying OmniFocus & Midnight Inbox I have to say that THINGS is by far the easiest and best. Sure it has some ‘bugs’ but the team are right behind it and always willing to take a comment.

I really enjoy it and it’s not become an integral part of my day