Do you feel envious whenever you see a screenshot of a perfectly arranged list like the one above? Seeing a random tweet from someone with an Omnifocus screenshot on their Today’s List? But is the $258 OmniFocus 2, plus the $128 Pro version included in the subscription, worth nearly $400 for the OmniFocus 2? Is this legendary “productivity” software, which has won many APPLE awards and numerous accolades from the tech industry, worth it? (This article is written with an attitude, a “worth it” attitude, and a style that does not guarantee scientific rigour.)
When I first tried OmniFocus, like many of you, I wondered what kind of software I was wasting my money on. After giving OmniFocus a year’s window, I finally got the idea to try it again when I upgraded to OmniFocus 2. I abandoned all distractions and negative influences, and honestly asked Google teachers for tutorials, and after reading many answers from the gods and many conclusions from domestic forums, I have a little feeling about what OmniFocus is really suitable for. Of course, you must have heard of GTD and know that OmniFocus is very suitable for GTD, but do you know what GTD is? Do you understand why OmniFocus is suitable for GTD? If you expect me to make you understand in just a few words what GTD is that can improve the efficiency that everyone is worried about, please go out and turn right and never buy any software from the Omni family~ If you expect to spend a little time on a random Baidu to understand what is good about GTD and how to use it, please also go out and turn right and come back when you have the patience~
First of all, I’d like to throw in a couple of big pictures of GTD, which I think I’ve picked up from Zhihu. (Read the notes first, then look at the diagrams!)
This diagram first classifies what tasks are not to be recorded in OmniFocus and what need to be recorded in OmniFocus. Please save this diagram and, once you have decided to buy OmniFocus and buy it, follow along and try to understand it, drawing different distinctions according to your needs. (Even better with the various OmniFocus basic tutorials~)
This diagram is a great explanation of the GTD, at least you should be glad it’s not all text, there are layers of relationships and different colours (more on the text part later hehe 🌚). At first glance it must be very confusing to think that it doesn’t seem that impressive! Sure…. If it was that easy to spot, you’d be using OmniFocus efficiently by now!
Remember, GTD will only reward you if you are disciplined and spend time on it, and as mum and dad always say, “hard work pays off”. (Finding no reward? (find that it doesn’t pay off? Refresh your GTD, watch the gods’ notes, watch the gods’ experience.) You should know that GTD is not something you can learn in minutes.
Here are some big points translated from the English article
Here I sit, many months later, working hard to fully integrate GTD into my daily life. I’ll admit, it isn’t easy and can take a good deal of investment.
Here I sit, many months later, working hard to fully integrate GTD into my daily life.
GTD takes work and after reading the book shared above, you won’t magically unlock part of your brain and be able to easily remember to make a phone call to your mother on Mother’s Day. You need to put in the effort to maintain your system and more systems, and more and more different projects require greater effort to maintain in order to function.
GTD is inherently time consuming. As above, it takes effort and you will naturally take time, and there are many tools in the selection of tools that are more time consuming, and if you don’t use them well, it will take several times as long to maintain your project.
GTD requires you to be disciplined. Thanks to the breakdown of GTD, you will find that you can handle tasks very quickly. However, things happen for a reason and if you don’t keep up your system, then your system will go wrong, get stuck and break down completely. I had a lot of problems in the beginning and I assure you that taking the time to maintain your system properly is just as important as adding the most important tasks each week. So you need to be very disciplined to be able to maintain and modify your system consistently.
The more you invest in GTD, the more you will benefit. The more persistent you are, the more you will receive.
After reading all these words about persistence, time and effort, and the need for self-discipline, are you about to give up? Are you thinking, “Why should I use you if I can persevere, work hard and discipline myself? Just study hard! Don’t panic! Here’s the point.
You know, everyone says that learning needs to be gradual and that work should not be quick. If you can really study and always be disciplined, work hard and do your best, well… you might not need to use GTD! Maybe GTD will take you time at first and make you feel bored, but once you get started with GTD, it becomes a tool, it becomes gasoline, it gets you up to speed and OmniFocus, is an essential part of this, a GTD tool that is very important for GTD implementation.
Why is that?
As you can see from the above a large part of the effort is in the maintenance, from the beginning of recording in a book, to web based tools, to ramshackle APPs, to the various GTD task apps that have evolved, OmniFocus is more than unique. While others have to spend hours keeping the whole GTD system running, you can just flick open your phone to edit, lift your wrist to check items from your watch and sync seamlessly across Mac, iPad, iPhone, AppleWatch, naturally with much less effort on the web than you once had to write by hand.
Some of the unique points in Omnifocus 2.
The postponement function allows you to set up a postponement function to solve the problem of having too many events in a day, but you find that the ones you don’t need to execute on that day can be turned into a to-do list, and through the pre-postponement function, you can effectively find out how much control you have over your tasks and projects, and how much time you have to anticipate, and by recording patiently in the early stages, you can avoid many errors in anticipation in the later stages.
It allows you to customise the categories of your perspective to suit your needs, put multiple projects together for easy collaboration, sort by deadline, and then sort by whether or not you have a marker to create your own at-a-glance interface. Effectively circumventing the need to click on items one by one to make changes (as OmniFocus’ multiple layers are also a feature).
Unlimited hierarchy, unlimited folders within folders, folders can be moved back and forth, items can be moved back and forth, tasks and items can be switched to each other, long press to return directly to the main screen. Quick access to projects in Perspective is also available for easy editing.
Software shortcuts. The iPad version already supports shortcuts to the external keyboard, and the Mac version has many shortcuts that can make you three times more efficient. (Provided you use them! You’ll get very used to it!)
The Mail Drop feature is truly a Zero Inbox for your mailbox. any content that needs to be processed later, forwarded to your own Mail Drop email address, will appear in OmniFocus’ Inbox, which is a very handy feature, especially if you are working on a PC.
Powerful view and search, search supports intermittent search, can search under different levels, can work with completed and discarded content, can customise the view and choose whether to see completed, discarded, unblocked, paused items etc.
Absolutely fast inbox and Siri recording, no matter what interface, what perspective, what project or folder you are in, there will be an Add to Inbox button in the bottom right hand corner, so you can immediately record any project you see in your Inbox and sort it out later, or you can open the Siri recording function and say the two words you specify plus the thing you want to do to quickly add it to OmniFocus.
Multi-faceted sharing and file support, with the ability to grab links directly, support for notes, direct attachments of images and recordings, and a list to show if there are attachments.
WebDAV support in China. For the slow syncing in OmniFocus’ own China region, support for third-party WebDAV is not too difficult to get started.
The whole UI and interaction, quick search, add, gesture to swipe up to add, long press to return to the main screen, show the number of contents included, show if there are attachments, black and white theme switch automatically.
Review checks, by default, are checked once a week, on the Mac version you can move them directly, but not yet on the mobile version, but after the first week, you can adjust the items in the Review, so that the insignificant items are checked only when they grow, and the urgent items are checked once a day or once a week, which prevents you from forgetting the item when the deadline is approaching and it is too late to break it down and finish it.
Detailed Context, in short labels, is recommended for light use depending on the needs and can be an effective way of categorising the brain power and time spent, for example setting “@!!!” for the most time and effort and “@!” for the easiest, so that you can visually see the time spent on each task in the list.
It may seem a bit cluttered, but that’s because there’s no way to categorise them all, and it may seem like they’re all bland, but it’s OmniFocus that does it all perfectly and seamlessly! As the saying goes, the simplest things are perhaps the hardest to do, and OmniFocus takes the simplest of things and makes them the best, no more, no less. The most important thing is that with this tool, many of the hassles of GTD have been solved, and the cost of maintenance and time planning for the system has been minimised in GTD. (Provided you use it well and don’t add a bunch of grocery lists saying the software is a waste of money!)
For example, with Moke’s tweet crawling, deferral and perspective functions, it is possible to create a Read Leater perspective of the tweets of interest you see when swiping. Everything that should be on the screen is there. For example, Manico, a Mac productivity app, Singularity, a third-party microblogging app, and @Turadin, the author of the efficiency app Tomato Clock, used OmniFocus for all three of their apps and Swift language conversions.
If you’ve read the GTD content, read the articles written by people using GTD and OmniFocus, and you’re still not impressed, then I’ve failed! If you have a little understanding of GTD but find what I have said a bit difficult, but want to try GTD, I don’t mind if you try it with other software, but I think you will give up on GTD if you try it, but OmniFocus is indeed an efficiency software with in-depth research and development of GTD, and with the guidance of many gods, there are countless articles to teach you how to do it. you, I don’t believe you won’t!
But remember! Don’t be limited by the design and ideas of the gods, GTD is most effective when it suits the rules of your life! If you’ve been tempted by OmniFocus, and after reading this article you’ve decided to use GTD to make yourself more efficient, feel free to just buy it! Even if you don’t have the perseverance, at almost $1000 for 400 plus $80 for the Mac version, you’ll be able to keep going.
