Switching to Things from OmniFocus

By Zsolt Benke

I’m thinking about switching back to Things from OmniFocus.

I feel that OmniFocus 4 is too buggy and weird, especially on iOS. I just want to have simple project based lists, with todos attached to them.

Things also uses Markdown for its notes, which is pretty nice. In my mind, it just makes more sense, than rich-text in OmniFocus notes.

What I like in OmniFocus is the way that it can be used like an outliner. Things has more rigid structure, but I have scripts and shortcuts, which makes Bike a great backbone for Things. I can create a new outline, then export its todos to Things with a checklist. This could be used to avoid having some form of freeform structure behind Things.

I think I also have think about how I do the deep session integration in Things, since currently this aspect of Shortcuts is also optimized for OmniFocus.

Actions are Tyme tasks, projects are Tyme projects, then folders are Tyme categories.

Things would be: todos are Tyme tasks, projects are Tyme projects, areas are Tyme categories. We can’t track todos without a project basically.

I also have a lot of someday maybe items in Things, so I don’t have to migrate that to OmniFocus, like I originally planned (yes I switched to OmniFocus from Things, because OmniFocus can focus on items).

I’m trying to use more apps, but for more focused tasks. Everything should start from Drafts, but at the end, information just gets transformed to different formats, and each app should manage its format the best.

I should also try to integrate Things with Strflow for journaling. It would make sense to keep these in DEVONthink like I did with OmniFocus, but having Strflow notes just feels a little bit more focused and better. It is minimal timeline app, and these notes are just status updates in a way. I can also link them together, like a minimal Zettelkasten.

I have to adapt my Sync OmniFocus with Calendar to Things as well.

Let’s create a project for this…

The problem with a switch like this is that it is hard to migrate all my stuff from one app to another. We have the database on it’s own, but there are automations and auxiliary apps which has to be migrated too.