OmniFocus 2 for OS X

OmniFocus 2 for Mac will be here in two days:

Just a little over 48 hours until we ship OmniFocus 2.0 for Mac: http://t.co/AqGGZkzPyv

For as long as I have know that it was coming, I just assumed that OmniGroup would get my $80 on day one.¹

I am not so sure anymore.

I originally switched to OmniFocus from Things, back in 2011. Things had limitations, OmniFocus fixed those limitations, and all was right with the world. For a while.

The last few months have been different. The complexity of OmniFocus has been wearing on me, particularly the new iPhone version. It's too hard to enter a task. There are too many fields. The date pickers are still terrible. There is still no easy way to handle templates on iOS.

Task name. Notes. Project name. Context. Start date. Due date.

It's too much.

Sure, I could pick and choose what I use, but it's this complexity that gives OmniFocus it's power.

For about a month, I have been slowly getting into TaskPaper. I haven't ported all my tasks over - just a subset of work tasks. Sometimes it works great, and the simplicity makes it a breeze to use. Other times, the limitations have me missing OmniFocus.

Simple takes time

I'll need to put together a whole new set of tools to get tasks into TaskPaper easily. I'll need new Drafts and Launch Center Pro actions, along with some way to add tasks by mail. It's all possible, but it also takes time.

There's also the question of scale. I have doubts that TaskPaper will scale well with a large number of projects and tasks. That's why I am starting out small. OmniFocus, for all it's complexity, does a great job of only showing me tasks that can be done now.

I am not saying that I'm done with OmniFocus. I am not saying that I won't buy OmniFocus 2 for Mac.² I am just saying that it's no longer automatic.