September 15th, 2008

I have an awful short-​term memory.

I have a ten­dency to forget names, small tasks, and some­times very impor­tant infor­ma­tion. This hap­pens at work, at home, every­where. I’ve learned to cope with this short­com­ing over time by using lots of paper, and more recently, lots of cool tech­nol­ogy to help me remem­ber things and stay organized.

For a while now, I’ve been using Omni­Fo­cus, a GTD appli­ca­tion for the Mac. GTD is basi­cally the con­cept of dump­ing all of your thoughts and ‘to-do’ items into a master list, sort­ing that list into pri­or­i­tized tasks and/or projects, and then of course, get­ting things done. Lots of folks take this stuff too seri­ously, but I really do think that it helps a scat­ter­brained mess like myself stay focused. In fact, over the past year or so I have become very depen­dent on such a system to keep me on task at work.

Anyway, Omni­Fo­cus has broken my heart for the last time. Basi­cally, when the iPhone started allow­ing soft­ware to be writ­ten for it, Omni­Fo­cus was a per­fect can­di­date to have a ver­sion that could sync to your desk­top app. You see, one of the worst things about having a soft­ware based GTD solu­tion is that the list lives on your com­puter, and many of the times that ideas or tasks pop into my head … well, I’m not near a com­puter to key it in. That would lead me to email tasks to myself from my phone, which worked (OF scans your emails for key­words and adds items to your projects if they con­tain cer­tain phrases or words), but wasn’t per­fect. The iPhone ver­sion of Omni­Fo­cus closed the loop, and made enter­ing tasks a snap. It synced over the web tasks, due dates, the loca­tions of projects, and much more. I could juggle all of the crap I had to do at work, at Square­One, and at home. Life was orga­nized and good.

All was right in the world, until the for­got­ten fact that Omni­Fo­cus 1.1 is alpha soft­ware reared its ugly head.

The 1.1 ver­sion of the soft­ware that sup­ports sync­ing of tasks over the web is alpha soft­ware, and as such, it’s not exactly speedy or reli­able yet. I began to lose tasks that I thought I had entered, but weren’t show­ing up. Sync­ing a 1 megabyte file of data would take 10 min­utes or more, ren­der­ing the iPhone ver­sion use­less. The iPhone app would some­times crash, losing the changes I was making. You get the idea. If you cannot ‘trust the system’, and you are con­stantly won­der­ing if all of your tasks are actu­ally even there, you have a problem.

Once Omni­Fo­cus 1.1 is final­ized and the iPhone app’s sta­bil­ity issues are addressed, I look for­ward to going back to it. It really is a great com­bi­na­tion of soft­ware when it works. But for now, I’m trying out other stop­gap solu­tions to hold me over until that time. Remem­ber the Milk so far is the winner, and they have a good iPhone web app that works just fine. It’s not per­fect, but it actu­ally works, and I can trust it.

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3 Responses to “Lost Focus.”

1. vince says:
   September 16th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

   Omni­Fo­cus has too much of a heft price tag for both its desk­top and iPhone appli­ca­tions which is why I chose things [http://​cul​tured​code.​com/​t​hings/]. It’s not truly com­pa­ra­ble as for fea­ture to fea­ture, but it works for me per­fectly with it being more laid back and less ’structured’.
2. Daniel says:
   September 16th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

   Yeah, Things is a nice app, to be sure. That was the first GTD type app that I tried out, and for a while thought it was the one I’d stick with. But when the dust set­tled, I went back to Omni­Fo­cus.

   You’re right though – $100 for the iPhone app and for the desk­top is a bit hefty. But for me, it’s the one system that works exactly how I want it to. I can auto­mat­i­cally pull base­camp emails out of my inbox, assign a con­text, and sort thru those a few times a day to make sure I never miss a thing.

   The sync issue is just killing me right now. Remem­ber the Milk is very simple and clean, but it just doesn’t do things the way I want, or are accus­tomed to.
3. John B. Kendrick says:
   September 16th, 2008 at 8:25 pm

   I use a GTD that allows me to view my entire GTD at work on my Win machine, at home on my Macs and even on my cell phone. And another app lets me call in tasks to my GTD with­out any writ­ing or typing, great for those thoughts that hit me while dri­ving. I’ve writ­ten about my expe­ri­ences with GTD in a blog post at http://​johnk​endrick.​word​press.​com/​2​0​0​8​/​0​3​/​2​7​/​m​o​r​e​-​g​e​t​t​i​n​g​-​t​h​i​n​g​s​-done/ John