Now that I’ve ranted, you’re going to tell me that I can customize this and you’d be right. It’s a hidden piece of UI that adds friction to using OmniFocus as your task manager. Even on a smaller screen on my 6S Plus, there is plenty of room to see my defer dates. Even after a month I’d look at the task entry pane only to wonder where defer dates were, then remember they were hidden and reach up to touch “Show More” so I could access my defer dates.Īs you can see in the screenshot, I’m on a big iPad, there is plenty of space to show me the defer dates. Well you probably guessed because I put an arrow in the screenshot above. I’ll give you a hint, it’s hidden under the “Show More” menu in the bottom left. This is easily achieved with OmniFocus by using defer dates, if you can figure out where it is. I want to see the writing stuff in the time I’ve set aside for writing and the development tasks when I’ve got development time on my schedule. I don’t want to see the 6 actions for a client writing project alongside the 3 things I’m going to do for a development project in the afternoon. I make liberal use of defer dates and times so that my tasks are scheduled and available when I can actually do them. My second big annoyance with OmniFocus for iPad is that one of the big parts of the UI I want to use feels hidden. After a month trying to get used to it, I still felt like I was spending so much time editing tasks that I should have been spending doing work. Really that’s the kicker, it always felt like it took so long to add or edit tasks in OmniFocus. I shouldn’t have to touch due dates, defer dates 3, estimated task duration, tags, or anything else on a task or project. That’s it…I want keyboard commands for everything. Here is my response for them, and every app out there that expects users to get work done quickly.Įvery single item that can be done by touching the UI should have a keyboard command. I did bring this up with OmniGroup on Twitter and they asked me to tell them which keyboard commands I want. Unfortunately, unlike macOS, you can’t create your own keyboard shortcuts to use an otherwise good tool. It’s not just productivity apps either, it’s the rare app that treats the iPad as a proper pro tool with keyboard shortcuts. I’ve been given free keys to a few productivity apps in the last few months and declined reviewing any of them because they had no keyboard shortcuts when used with a keyboard. Now OmniFocus isn’t alone in their neglect of keyboard shortcuts. I still don’t think that we’re at the place we need to be for keyboard support for OmniFocus on the iPad. Sure, the 2019 roadmap says they want to improve keyboard navigation, and maybe they did. Let’s start with the biggest glaring hole in OmniFocus for iPad, the keyboard shortcuts seem like an after-thought. Heck, even before iPadOS shipped OmniFocus was lagging behind some of it’s competitors like Things 2 on some of the items below. While the above items are nothing to scoff at, OmniFocus isn’t up to par for the iPad we have today. There are way more features in Omnifocus that many others have covered too, but I’m not going to get into them. Just check out this custom “David Allen” OmniFocus iPad homescreen built after someone heard him talk about his ideal setup at a conference. While OmniFocus doesn’t stand head and shoulders above the rest with it’s Shortcuts support, it’s no slouch either. Since the lack of reviewing what you have to do is 98% 1 of the reason that any task management process falls part, it makes sense to have something awesome like OmniFocus has.Īnother great feature is that you can automatically add projects to OmniFocus with Shortcuts. It’s got a stellar custom UI to surface the projects you should review, and you can set different intervals for each project so that you don’t go overboard with reviewing things that just don’t need it. I don’t want to undersell this at all, there is no task manager I’ve seen ever that was even in the same ballpark as OmniFocus is when it comes to reviewing your projects. One of the consistent points in favour of OmniFocus has always been it’s review feature. Now that I’m mostly working from an iPad Pro, I thought it was time to take a look at OmniFocus again to see how it stacked up against the competitors. And that’s not even all the times I’ve talked about OmniFocus on my site, even saying in 2012 OmniFocus wasn’t quite cutting it. Back in 2013 I wrote a long post about how I use OmniFocus to get work done, but even before that I shared some speed tips to use OmniFocus from the keyboard. There are many times in my 10 year productivity journey that I’ve used OmniFocus as my main task manager.
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