Searching in OmniFocus

I’ve been on OmniFocus for three months now and so of course I am feeling the compulsion to switch task managers. It’s a curse with me. I keep thinking the next one will solve my productivity problems. For a couple of years I’ve switched back and forth between OmniFocus and Things.

All this switching back and forth is a complete waste of time.

This time around, rather than switch, I’m trying to identify what it is about Things that attracts me. There are two I can think of:

One problem is addressed here: Things makes it easy for me to quickly search to see whether I’ve already added a task, before I’ve added a new one. That’s also do-able in OmniFocus, but it requires a modicum of keyboard shortcut fanciness:

https://inside.omnifocus.com/blog/search-entire-database-mac

The second thing I find appealing about Things is that it’s organized around the idea of a a “big long undifferentiated list of things that you need to get done.” Things makes it very easy to look at your inbox, decide whether you need to do something right away, decide “no I do not,” and move that task to your “Anytime” list. If you decide you need to get to an item right away, you can easily add a star to it. I’m working on figuring out a way to replicate that functionality in OmniFocus. Even with Version 3, OmniFocus still wants you to think in terms of projects, and that’s just not how my mind works. For 90% of what I need to do, I just think in terms of “here are the things I need to do.”

It may have been a mistake for me to switch from Things to OmniFocus in August, but that’s done and I am trying to resist the impulse to switch back. The compulsion is strong though – surely if I just switch this ONE LAST TIME I will have found the perfect task manager and my life will be completely organized!