I love that Eduard dropped a Kanban feature in Noteplan right after this episode dropped. He’s coming for you Sparky …
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I mean, I agree with this in principle, but that’s not how my life works. I run a business with clients. Each client might have a few projects, and I have a few projects for my business.
Today alone, this is what got touched:
- I completed my November Finances project for tax time
- I completed my December finances project for tax time-
- I started a new project for January finances-
- I completed a project for Client A
- Then took notes and grabbed a bunch of resources for a potential new project for Client A. The project might not happen, but I need what they sent me if it does.
- I had a meeting with Client B where one project became more important than another, so the new project has priority over the old, but both need to get done
- Client C called in a panic about a fire that was going to be a project. New project got started, but the situation resolved itself and they called me back with an apology and a few follow-up emails to confirm where they’re at later, and a few notes for my records on their work.
- Client D emailed about a meeting on Friday to review an initiative of theirs that’s taken four years and has comprised literally dozens of projects in that time, about 12 of which are in progress right now, sometimes simultaneously (it’s code, and that code can sometimes affect multiple projects, so it’s all interconnected, but different). They also have another initiative happening concurrently, and I just wrapped up their Christmas campaign in my last working day before the holidays.
That’s just one day. It doesn’t include every client or project. It’s a normal day for me. This makes any task manager crumble. A lot of that is task-adjacent, but not a task. How can I stick it all in there?
The only other option, if one were to neglect PM systems, is to just throw a bunch of docs in the Finder with dates or numbers in the file names, which a lot of people do, but is not how I prefer to work. The problem with notes and tasks living separately is that a PM system should provide a historical record of what got done when, and why, as well as lists and notes for what needs to be done and what their status is.
I have clients who say things like “what did we do for the Christmas 2022 campaign?” Well, Omnifocus can’t tell me. My tasks aren’t specific enough. My notes are, though! They include copy and images. In conjunction with my tasks, these records are invaluable resources.
I know I’m an edge case on this forum, but at the same time, a ton of us are power users who treat OF as a project manager. It’s just not that.
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I use Drafts every day, but don’t conceive of it as a task manager—perhaps that’s why it wasn’t mentioned. One of the many ways it’s so impressive is that you could conceivably craft it into any tool that you’d like—including a task manager. However, I can’t imagine doing this if you had a complex task management environment with lots of tasks, projects, or date-specific tasks.
I’m a long-time OmniFocus user and have used Craft now and again since it was released. I think it works best as a visual, WYSIWYG markdown-based notes app with collaborative capabilities. The developers seem implement dramatic changes every year or so, so perhaps they have added more task management capabilities. But, to respond to your query, I can’t conceive of comparing Craft and OmniFocus. I think of Craft as a note-centric tool.
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This comment from David made me laugh out loud while working out at the gym and listening to this episode:
Yeah, one risk with digital task managers is that it becomes like that room at the end of Indiana Jones for your tasks, right? It’s just a bunch of crates, as far as the eye can see, and you don’t know what’s important to you.
If you don’t know the clip he’s referring to, you can see it here.
I seem to remember David Allen referring to “someday maybe” lists (of the kind Stephen was discussing in Things) as “probably never,” which has been true for me.
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Apps don’t manage anything. At best they are tools to help us manage things. I’d completely agree you need a system for managing projects and tasks, and that some people find it helpful to run two parallel systems while others try to run a single system. At the end of the day, though, what matters is what you do to achieve the project by doing tasks - that’s the work that will be productive: managing that is necessary and can make a difference to your productivity (e.g. by avoiding needless tasks) but it isn’t what makes things happen.
In my mind there is a simple distinction between task management and project management. Project management are the things my team is working on now and in the future. For this we use Jira. Task management is the stuff I’m working on which includes some of the items in Jira, but lots of other things in my life like playing pickleball, making calls to family members on their birthday, etc. For this I use Things.
When I do a weekly review, I will review Jira and several tasks usually fall out of that review and become tasks in Things. Setup meeting with Jim next week to discuss project X, etc.
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This is also fairly close to how I run my setup: put a week’s worth of tasks in OF (and tasks with hard due dates so I don’t miss them in the larger, more complex system), and do a weekly review of Notion. Pretty straightforward. Both are useful tools for different purposes.
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I really enjoyed this episode, and learned about a couple task managers that I wasn’t familiar with. There’s so many options out there, and virtually everyone I know lives and dies by OmniFocus. I’m a very happy Things user though. All in all, a fantastic episode and it made me go download ToDoist and a couple others just to see if they could change my preferences like David talked about doing.
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I enjoy hearing about all the options being offered and their differentiating features, but I’m not easily lured away from Toodledo despite the more polished UIs of the newer apps. I basically run a small business out of Toodledo, heavily relying on its GTD approach, the recurring task options (like the repeat from due date or from completion date), allowing start and due dates, and being web-based/cross platform. The free account is incredibly useful with some advanced features available in their paid plan. It isn’t the prettiest task manager, but it continues to be the best and most economical one for me.
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I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of Toodledo. But I searched and found that you and a couple of others have mentioned it before. I can see why you like it. And it appears it might be a solution for others that keep trying to make Reminders do things it isn’t designed to do. 
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OmniFocus has education pricing
The old saying is “use the right tool for the job”, not “use one tool for every job”, for good reason. 
There’s another old saying about “if your only tool is a hammer…” which might also apply. 
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I’m just now learning about the discount. That makes it more enticing. I like OF, I’ll have to give this more thought.
What I’m not going to do is be hasty. I’ve made that mistake too many times.
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I enjoy you going deep on the difference between task management and project management!
If you still have some energy left to discuss this further, I have some questions:
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It sounds a bit like Notion is your “note taking tool”. What are the specific structures that make it a project management tool? If you can, could you elaborate on the difference to a bare note taking tool?
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when you pull out “a weeks worth of tasks” into OmniFocus, how do you keep those original tasks in notion current?
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can’t you just make a view in notion that shows you a weeks worth of tasks? Why don’t you? (Probably integration with non work stuff?)
Good questions!
- Notion is more than a note taking tool, at least for me. I don’t take a lot of notes outside of meeting notes. I have several databases that transform it from notes into a project focus. I have a database for initiatives (a group of projects oriented towards a common goal, like a website launch). Asana would call this a “goal,” but they lock it behind an expensive tier and it doesn’t really work for me as a solopreneur.
I have another database called Projects, with relational fields that are associated with people (direct reports), teams (like clients but a bit more flexible semantically), meeting notes, etc. I have a bunch of project templates that can automatically add the correct tasks to a project and get those tasks in my tasks database, which I can slice and dice whichever way I want in its database view, but which also is filtered on each project page to show me just the open tasks for that project. I also have a view to show me closed tasks for the project.
Tasks and projects have different statuses: waiting, on hold, completed, in progress, not started, etc. I have not found a way to replicate this outside of a project management environment. A task might say “develop the coffee bag landing page,” but that is not detailed enough to remember where I am day to day or week to week as time goes on, so the status field helps. In each task, Notion lets me write down all the notes I need to to keep track of things and remember what I’m doing and where I’ve gotten stuck. Sometimes I’ll throw in code snippets that I tried that didn’t work, or links to online resources I’m reviewing for later.
With the tool set up this way, I can look at a database of people, projects, initiatives, tasks, or meeting notes and eventually find my way to all the related work I need to do from any of those perspectives. I could keep everything separate and in different places, like keeping the notes in a different place, but it would get unwieldy. A lot of my meeting notes, for example, will be with one team about multiple projects. I don’t know how I would store that in a traditional file management system without using tags, but I don’t believe that a project should be a tag in the Finder.
Finally, the thing that makes Notion a PM tool for me rather than a mere note taking tool is the way I can mark a project or initiative as complete (and do the same as tasks), and it keeps all those database records. They are never evicted from memory. This is critical for people who need records of how they got their work done. As a simple example, I threw a website launch party last year when a project was complete in partnership with a local brewery. I’m going to do that again this quarter. Before I start, I can review my notes, my list of contacts, and the tasks I had to do last time to make sure I’m not missing anything. I also wrote some quick thoughts on how to improve the next one, and that will be in the same convenient place. If I needed to do this with my notes in the Finder and my tasks in OmniFocus, the tasks would have been archived by now, and the notes would be harder to find and more difficult to track alongside those tasks.
That doesn’t mean I can’t use the Finder. I have a bunch of files actually stored in the Finder for a lot of my work, of course. But for something that might relate to a task or to a project that seems ephemeral — here’s the client’s back-of-the-napkin sketch about what they want for their app! — Notion is where it goes.
For a little bit more insight into what started me down this path, watch this video (it’s been shared on this forum before, but not by me). It started me down this rabbit hole a year ago. I’ve tried every project manager and had foibles and quibbles with all of them. Notion is the only one that I could get to work the way my brain works. Asana comes close, but it’s terribly expensive for all the pro functionality and you have to buy multiple seats (no single seat option). - I keep everything current either by checking it off simultaneously or by weekly/daily reviews. Sometimes the tasks in OF and Notion aren’t exactly the same. My OF task will say “Complete November finances,” the details of which are all in Notion. The Notion task will say “Finish updating Client A website,” and there will be 20 subtasks in OF that would otherwise clutter up my Notion view and are only written down so I can sort out my paralysis. They’re not a direct match.
- I could do weekly task filters in Notion! It wouldn’t be difficult. Two personal reasons I don’t: the first is that Notion is a little weird about due dates; I don’t like the way they work. So anything with a due date goes into OF so I see it in Today views. The second reason is that I have a bit of ADHD, and it helps my brain to see a different UI for tasks with more time-associated pressure.
I was very anti-Notion until something like November of last year. They finally added functionality to make this possible for me, with a bunch of automation flows within the app that make it easy for me to achieve what I want to achieve. But it’s not perfect. I would love it if it were a native app, of course. The mobile app kinda stinks. Etc, etc. But it gets the job done for me, and that’s more than I can say for any other PM system, and it’s more than I can say for OF (at least when it comes to managing projects. Tasks are aces in OF and Things).
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One time purchase for version 4. Until they do version 5. Version 3 → 4 took years. I’m assuming 4 → 5 will take longer than the ADHD boredom takes to set in.
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imho i don’t like the ui at all, which is the same reason i prefer reminders over ticktick
Agreed! I’ve enjoyed this discussion, too.
My perspective is a task manager needs to be more fast and focused than a project manager because representing a project means entering and showing too much non-task information. The realities of software development make it hard for one app to be great at both in different views/modes.
Same for single-user and multi-user design. Usually task management skews the former and project management the latter.
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I thought I would be tempted to go back to Omnifocus (I was a long-time user starting with Kinkless GTD) or try a new app, as Things has not seen a substantive update for quite a long time. Fortunately, nothing I heard persuaded me to look elsewhere. One of the key benefits of Reminders is how good it is with Siri making capture very easy. David and Stephen did not mention that Things has good integration with Reminders and I use Siri in the car, on my watch (even in the shower) to get things off my mind into the Inbox. I find that this works great and I can correct, amend, or delete, before clicking the Import All to Things.
The only feature I would like for Things is the ability to attach images
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This topic is always conflicting for me. I have to use ClickUp for work and I don’t really have any complaints about that, but it’s way too complex for any personal stuff. My issue seems to be finding a focus and just diving deep into a single system. For so long I’ve just been so disorganized with items and notes scattered among Apple Notes, Things, NotePlan, and Reminders and not enough consistent or long term use in any system to be able to actually pick a favorite 
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