Posted on June 16, 2009 - by rfrank

Why I Use OmniFocus

If you’re a task-oriented person, you’ll enjoy this blog post. If you’re people-oriented go ahead and keep reading, you just won’t find it as interesting. Since I opened that can of worms, let me tell you that I’m a task-oriented guy that is growing to be more of a people-oriented person. The ministry is all about people, amen? People work always trumps paper work.

Two years ago I came to a breaking point. My task lists were overwhelming me. I’m a full-time children’s pastor, the publisher of a growing bi-monthly magazine, the leader of a growing company, and serve on a handful of boards. Each of these have a way of creating some nice task lists. My breaking point came when I realized I couldn’t manage my tasks. I was working off a task list in Mail, several Excel spreadsheets, a few Stickies, and a pad of paper. It was a classic mess.

Then I discovered OmniFocus. It’s powerful task-management software. Here’s what I like about it.

1. Tasks (called actions in OmniFocus) can be as simple or complex as you want. You can simply add a task (Pick up some goldfish crackers before Sunday) or add a task complete with a due date, context, reminder, and the whole nine yards.

2. You can organize your tasks by category. Some of my categories include: This Week, Personal, Church, KidzMatter, K! Magazine, INCM, etc. Each of these categories even have subcategories with tasks under each.

3. You can send yourself to-dos from your email. Omnifocus will watch for incoming emails that are tasks and will automatically add them to your Omnifocus inbox. Come on, you’ve gotta admit that this is cool.

4. The context feature is one of my favorite things. Remember, I probably have 30 different task lists in OmniFocus. Since each task can have a context, like “Errands”, I can view all of my tasks by context. This means all of my errands will show up in a nice list when I am ready to start shopping.

5. You can capture tasks anywhere. This is good if you have the memory of a goldfish like I do. OmniFocus is based on David Allen’s popular Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity system. The first principle in that system is that you should be able to add (capture) new to-dos whenever and wherever they occur to you. If you are typing an email and think of a task, with a few keystrokes, you can add a task to Omnifocus. You can do this from any application on your Mac.

6. There’s an OmniFocus app for the iPhone. This means your task list is always synched with your iPhone. Nice!

OmniFocus 1.0.6 (the current version) is the coolest task management software I have found. If you’re like me and you spend as much time managing your to-do list as you do actually completing the tasks on it, you’ll be hooked. That’s my two cents worth.