I could finally give a look at the Things web site, and I must admit this seems very promising. Nice looking, simple to use and consult, apparently very clean and effective. I can’t wait to put my hands on the preview copy.
Paolo
Exactly.
But also Taskpaper is a terrific little app. I use it as a mini-outliner if I need a third editor in Scrivener … ok, I don’t really need it, but Taskpaper is so clean, it’s never ever in the way.
Things is definitely still alpha. Drag and drop doesn’t work everywhere you would expect it to; I have witnessed data loss (though that might have been user error); notes implementation is a touch rough; tasks cannot have a repeating due date; and you can only have flat lists at the moment. BUT once those things are resolved, I will be anxious to give it a serious try, because the interface is very well designed and implemented. Once it is polished, I think it will be extremely slick.
To some extent I agree with you. OFocus is trying too hard (IMHO) to cover all possibilities and becoming over complex as a result. You do end up thinking fairly hard on how to use the prog rather than it being an automatic process.
I’m not really a dedicated GTD’er, but if I ever get on the ‘Things’ beta list, I’ll certainly give it a whirl.
I was using OmniFocus for a while, and it is, no doubt, powerful, but perhaps of the way I work, I find Things much more flexible–ant it’s actually helping me getting things done, rather than getting things postponed while I fill out all the fields in my GTD app.
I was about to purchase OF at the “early bird” price (the deal ends today)… and thought to check the Things site one last time… Well, what do you know?.. the Things alpha is now publicly available…
culturedcode.com/things/wiki/ind … nload_Page
After a few hours of Things use I’ve decided not to take advantage of the OF deal.
– Paul
I’ve been using Things for about a month now (I signed up for the private alpha) and - while I’m hardly a power user, testing it to the limits - I’ve found it remarkable stable and well thought out. I very much like the way the tagging system works, and suspect I’ll end up purchasing a copy when it’s released.
My thoughts exactly. I’m loving Things… it’s very easy and intuitive. OF was a bit too much for my needs.
(PS. I also like TaskPaper a lot. I tend to put my to do regarding every article / research I do there. Things is for day to day stuff.)
I’m still liking Things, too. The big thing I’m waiting for is recurrence. I have a zillion things that need to be done on a regular basis for my day job. I’ve been doing one-time planning and execution in Things though, and like how response it is. OF is a slug, even just typing into it, on new computers.
I just put recurring tasks in my calendar. All the things I need to do repeatedly are pretty much one-step actions anyway (“water plants”, “pay credit card bill”, etc.).
I tried that once, while using another todo program that didn’t have recurrence, and promptly decided to never do it again! The problem is, many of the recurring tasks are fairly complicated activities—more like recurring projects. I can address this in OmniFocus by creating “bucket” projects and then putting the recurring task groups in there with the repeat dates set to the group parent. I probably have about fifty or so, varying in complexity from “pay rent” to “publish monthly newsletter.” So things were getting too cross-referenced and cluttered for my taste. iCal popping up reminders to “See details in holding project Y” and so forth.
I’ll be curious to see how the developers of Things address this. The easiest way is how I’m doing it in OF, I think. Just let me put tasks in tasks, and let the parent task handle all of the details.
I’m with Amber on this – I tried both OmniFocus and Things and ended up buying OF because it seemed more congenial to how I think. But I also understand why others are liking Things. Fortunately, there is not one program that will suit everyone. To me OmniFocus seems more mature and capable of handling more complex setups, but that can be a huge disadvantage as well. And if you’re an avid tagger, Things seems clearly the way to go.
Best,
J
The latter - not unlike my own monthly comics deadlines - is precisely why I created the job sheets I’ve talked about in my “Getting Things Written” posts, to avoid having huge complex writing tasks buried in a to-do list somewhere 
When the structure of a program makes sense to you, there’s no point in fighting it.
I found the missing repeating tasks a drawback in THINGS, too, but I read a work-around that seems to help: just use the “postponed” area that Things provides.
When you postpone a task, Things asks you to postpone till when? When that time comes around, Things brings it back into play.
Not as handy as true repeating tasks that you set and forget, but a way!
ds
For those like me questioning the absence of recurrence/repeating-task settings in Things, here’s confirmation that they’re in the pipeline:http://culturedcode.com/things/blog/2008/02/habemus-dialogum-we-have-a-dialog.html
What an interesting post! Reminds of my days as a project manager in the software industry; I used to love that sort of decision process. Oh, the nostalgia…
I’m glad to see it mentioned.
After trying many similar programs, for me it is the best GTD application available for the Mac, with the added benefit of being multi-platform.
While it is free, it is possible to donate to the developers.
One criticism is that the interface is not what one would expect on a Mac. Other than that it has been wonderful for my needs.
Things looks very promising. I tried a beta and will eventually give it another try.
OmniFocus is ok, but even though I paid for it during the beta stages I keep going back to Thinking Rock.
I downloaded Things six weeks or so ago, I used it for two weeks, with gradually diminishing enthousiasm, and then even forgot about its existence. So today I trashed it. Things is not for me; but maybe that’s just because of me, not because of Things.
I still use it, every day in fact, and now that the repeating/recurring tasks function has been implemented in the beta, it’s even better. The only killer function I’m still waiting for is synching across multiple computers, but even without that Things still rocks for me.
So, horses for courses 