* Their "support Ninjas" are helpful and friendly. * Tasks can be set as parallel or sequential, helping you focus on tasks you can accomplish now that don't require another task being completed first. Being able to review tasks every week without being distracted by long term projects that should be reviewed once every 6 months or so seems important to me. You can set next actions to be reviewed at a specific frequency, such as every week, every month or every year. It's the only other reviewed GTD app (exception made of ThinkingRock) that specifically offers review mode capabilities. This can quickly become important for many in the long run. * In general, offers many more features than all its competitors. There is a Things forum, but it's strangely "hidden" in the sense that there is no link to it from most of the Things web pages. Sure, the developers will add these features eventually, but I don't think it's wise to go down that road not knowing when and if these missing features will make it. But you can't export to anything yet, making it impossible to share with colleagues at work, and you must systematicaly reselect the multiple tags to browse by context and projects or anything else (all represented by tags), which is a serious shortcoming in terms of efficiency. I'd like to choose Things, just because of its UI and tags approach. Since there are no contexts in Things, you need to browse your next actions by "projects" and then filter by context tags: not the most efficient.
It's the iPhone/iPod Touch app that I could actually try, thanks to a colleague. * No specific reviewing capabilities or easy why to set up automated focus criteria. * Missing: a web client to access and manage the Things database. Since Things relies on tags, it would make sense to have automatically updated searches in your vertical bar. a user selection of tags) and add it to your left column. * "Saved searches": you can't save a search (e.g.
Selecting tags in the top bar is the workaround. You can't use the search to find next actions related to two tags or more. * Search is poor to the point of being almost broken. You can print groups of tasks to pdf, but that's a fairly limited workaround. Highly probable that this is a feature that will "soon" be added to Things, but I'm not sure I wanna wait an unknown period of time. This might be Things' showstopper to me - you see, I really want/need to be able to share the status of my work related tasks with my supervisors and colleagues. This is problematic to me since I work on Debian Linux and don't have access to MacOS X at work.
* There is no way to export anything from Things to html or other sharable document. * Version 1.0 of Things was release at the beginning of the year, and as much as it's great looking, in terms of features, it shows. * Things relies on tags, which are very flexible but require some appropriate organization ( example). * The user interface is great looking and mostly efficient. Screenshots and screencasts are never as revealing as actually trying the app for a few days. GTD apps require more than 10 minutes of exploration to get a good feeling of it and its ability to fulfill your needs and fit your task organization style. It has been useful to me in order to identify the apps deserving review and providing clues about their general strengths and weaknesses. You'll find a lot of similar GTD app reviews on the Internet. Maybe I'll find out in the process that it doesn't help me that much after all, but I'm ready to try. I feel I'm now ready for the next level: a dedicated GTD tool. To be honest, it works relatively well, but there's a lot of room for improvements. Another expectation and intended goal is to reduce stress and frustrations.Īt the moment, I use a combination of calendar events and reminders, a few flat to-do lists and inbox emails for organizing myself. A GTD app is also a mean to review ongoing and future projects and help me get the big picture of my life, personal and professional. I wish I could tell you I found the one app that fully fill all my needs, but it's not case.įirst, why a GTD app? So many things I try or hope to accomplish in a diversity of overlapping contexts, I believe an app will help me keep track, thus not forget, the numerous next steps required to actually complete projects. All the reviewed apps can run on MacOS X. I tried five apps: Things, Life Balance, Chandler, ThinkingRock and OmniFocus. Also take into account the timing: by the time you read this, it's probable these apps have been updated and may offer significant improvements. The following is not a thorough review but might be useful to you, keep in mind your needs and tastes obviously differ from mines. Ok, I spent several hours over the last few weeks trying to seriously pinpoint the best Getting Things Done (GTD) app for my needs.