Omnifocus is one of my favourite programs for managing my projects and my life.  It has many nifty features a power user and productivity maniac can really appreciate and compared to all the other programs I’ve tried (including Things from Cultured Code, GTD Kinkless and iGTD) it’s a cut above the rest.  There are however 3 key improvements that would make Omnifocus leave its competitors in the dust (and make me and Macworld give it a 5 star rating).

IMPROVEMENT 1:  Tagging Project Actions

This is the one feature that Things from Cultured Code has that I wish Omnifocus had — in fact it might even help Improvement #3 later on.  Tagging means being able to label your action like “Buy milk from the local farmer on your way home” with words like Buy, Groceries and/or Errands.  In fact these tags could be used to create GTD (Getting Things Done) contexts in Omnifocus’ “Context” view.

A picture of the Things from Cultured Code interface

IMPROVEMENT 2.  Search Ability in the Inspector

Omnifocus uses scroll bars in its Inspector when assigning a Project or Context to an action.  Alas, if you have over 12 or more items on a menu, scrolling around and even hitting your keyboard to get their faster (to find it alphabetically) can be a pain — especially if you have something like John Doe: Manage Your Laundry: Coin Machines: Make the Right Change repeated 40 times.  Perhaps Omnifocus should do it Google style the same way they have for the rest of the interface and make it search friendly.

IMPROVEMENT 3.  Make the Database Leaner, Meaner and Faster

The biggest issue I have with Omnifocus is that its database operation is slow when you have thousands of task items in it (it gets worse if you’re clipping entire web pages, video or anything like that).  Even if you avoid clipping or entering huge files into the Omnifocus database after you get several thousand items in there you have to resort to some serious measures to speed it up which can be a hassle.

Omnifocus uses nearly 2 times more memory than Safari and at least 3 times more than the 3rd highest RAM sucking program I have (1Password) — it feels slow even on a 4GB RAM machine.  In fact I’ve had to resort to hard core UNIX commands like sudo renice to put more RAM into Omnifocus.  Since I’m no master of UNIX or scripting it is quite annoying to do this every time I use the program or need a speed boost.

It’s particularly bad when you’re switching between different views or “perspectives” like Projects (really slow since OF has to list and show ALL your task items) and Contexts (ditto).  Omnifocus has added its “Clean Up Archive” features and commands though it doesn’t really solve the real root problem — the way Omnifocus handles and stores your task information.

This almost reminds me of complaints I sometimes hear about MySQL.

If you’re a huge follower of using the basic ideas of David Allen’s Getting Things Done then you know you need to be able to dump all of your thoughts and ideas somewhere so that your mind can go blank and become a blank piece of paper for creativity.  Omnifocus and other task management programs are great for that reason alone.  The issue is being able to organize, act on and review that pool of information when you need it.

They’re going to have to find a better system to store and use information in the database.  This could be using tagging like Things or some other new way no one’s thought of.  It’s that or wait for quantum computing to appear.

In Conclusion…

Omnifocus has a lot of powerful customizable features that put it ahead of the game for hard core task managers out there.  The 3 major things that could be improved in Omnifocus that would help you and I vote it into the best task manager out there would be tagging ability, a search ability in the inspector and finding a way to speed it up even more.

PS.  The speed issue with databases is a pretty common problem even with programs like Devonthink Pro (try importing a lot of items into one of those databases)

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