A Look at OmniFocus

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A quick overview.

I tried OmniFocus for a few weeks to set up and maintain a Get Things Done (GTD) routine. I’m always interested in easy-to-use productivity tools that I can integrate into my workflow.

What OmniFocus Does

OmniFocusOmniFocus enables you to set up any number of projects, each of which can contain specific actions. For example, I might have a project for Flying M Air to send out a marketing letter to travel agents. Within that project might be the individual actions to get the job done: get a mailing list of travel agents, write the marketing letter, print out the materials, stuff envelopes, mail. You can set up a project so its actions must be completed in order (sequentially) or so that they can be completed in any order or concurrently (parallel). Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any way to set up some actions within a project to be sequential while others in the same event were parallel without creating groups of actions.

Each action can also be related to a context. A context is “where the work happens.” This is a lot less intuitive but, I suppose, it can be useful once you get an idea of how to use it. For example, you might set up contexts for telephone follow-up or errands. Personally, I had a problem distinguishing between context and projects and couldn’t maintain a consistent approach.

OmniFocus offers a number of commands and options that help you “focus” on specific projects or tasks. You can flag things, set priorities, enter start or end dates, and choose from a bunch of different status options. You can then create “perspectives,” which are views of tasks matching criteria. But setting these things up can be time consuming and isn’t very intuitive.

On Intuitiveness

I did not find OmniFocus to be very intuitive. For example, each time I entered a new action, I pressed Return. Return is usually the command programs use to end or accept an entry. In OmniFocus, it starts a new one. That’s likely because of the Omni Group’s experience with OmniOutliner, which this is apparently spun off from. But when I create a list of things to do, I don’t think of an outline. I think of a list of individual items. iCal doesn’t create a new item when you press Return after completing the entry of a new one. It doesn’t make sense to me that OmniFocus does.

The perspectives view looks and works just like the main OmniFocus window. Great. Except that a perspectives view contains a subset of all items and, if the View bar isn’t showing, it’s not clear that you’re looking at a subset. You wonder what happened to an event you’re looking for and maybe, like me, you think it’s been eaten by a quirk in the software. So you re-enter it and wind up with a duplicate when you finally realize you’re just looking at a subset of all actions.

Some items don’t appear at all, depending on how options are set and how the item is coded. That makes you think twice about whether you want to set sequential items as sequential — they might not appear in some views.

And I’m still not sure how OmniFocus applies color coding to tasks. I understand the red, but blue, gray, and purple? What does it mean? Without documentation during the beta process, I couldn’t be sure. (Now I don’t really care.)

Syncing…Sometimes

One of the features that attracted me to OmniFocus was its ability to sync with iCal. I had a heck of a time doing this with the beta versions, until tech support suggested that I turn off the Birthday’s Calendar in iCal. Evidently, there’s a bug in iCal and that was messing things up. When I disabled it, syncing worked okay.

But OmniFocus syncs based on context, not project. So I needed to not only use the context feature, but set up corresponding calendars in iCal to properly sort out the tasks. Then, when I manually synced with iCal — automatic syncing is not an option — each task’s project was appended to the task name in brackets. This made the task names in iCal unnecessarily long.

OmniFocus syncs only iCal tasks, not calendar events. I also had some trouble when I marked off tasks as done in one program, it would not consistently sync to the other. So tasks didn’t “go away” when they were done.

I should mention that I need iCal syncing because I sync between iCal and my Treo to have a complete list of events and tasks when I’m on the road. My memory is bad (and steadily getting worse) and I rely on my Treo to remind me of things I need to do when I’m away from my office.

What OmniFocus Doesn’t Do

OmniFocus is supposed to make it easy to “capture” tasks from other applications. This is extremely limited. For example, although I can capture a task from a mail message, there’s no way within OmniFocus to easily link to that message — even though each message in Leopard has a unique URL. Instead, I found myself copying and pasting message text into OmniFocus.

OmniFocus falls short as an outliner in that it only gives you three levels of outlining: projects, actions, and “sub-actions” (created when you group actions within a project). Four levels, if you also create folders to organize your projects. But I suppose that if you want an outliner, you’d use OmniOutliner.

There’s no easy way to relate one action to other actions because contexts are not like keywords and you can only assign one per action.

Printing is also extremely limited, so if you want to print off a list of actions to take to a meeting or on the road, you’re stuck with standard formatting with large fonts.

When Productivity Software Reduces Productivity

My main gripe with most of these GTD software “solutions” is that they make you do so much work to set them up and implement them.

OmniFocus is a prime example of this. I wasted an entire morning trying to get my iCal events into OmniFocus , sorting them into projects, and applying contexts. And then, when I synced them back to iCal, I wound up with a bunch of duplicate items in both programs that I had to weed out. While this might be due to buggy beta software, I can’t be sure. I could be a problem I’d be dealing with every time I completed a sync.

It’s far easier for me to simply open iCal and look at my task list, which is already sorted by my existing project-related calendars, to see what needs to be done.

I was hoping that OmniFocus would introduce features that were not in iCal. It did, but none of them were features I needed or even wanted. The ones I did want — primarily calendar and task list printing flexibility — were missing.

At the introductory price of $39.95, OmniFocus was a program to consider. I might have sprung for it and made it work. But when the folks at The Omni Group upped the price to its regular price of $79.95, they made the decision for me. I’ve already paid enough money for software I don’t use regularly.

OmniFocus simply isn’t the solution I’m looking for. It isn’t intuitive enough to be a good productivity tool for me.

I only wish I could get back the two to three days I spent trying to make it help me get things done.

On the Edge, Looking In

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One geek’s look at Macworld Expo and the state of the Mac.

Next week, I’ll be heading to Macworld Expo in San Francisco, mostly to do a presentation at the Peachpit Press booth.

For a 10-year period starting in 1992, I went to every Macworld: San Francisco, Boston (and then New York), and even the little-known Toronto shows in the mid 1990s. I was part of the Macworld Expo Conference Faculty and did a presentation in the Conference hall. One year, I did a solo panel and was on two other panels, too.

Those were the good old days of Macworld, when the speaker lounge was hopping with lots of friendly Mac “experts” and the attendees really did want to hear what we had to say about using Macs or specific applications. Everything was new and cool and even a writer who writes about something as ho-hum as operating systems and productivity applications for “end users” could put together a dynamic, interesting presentation in a room that was filled to standing room only.

Things change. Changes in show management and theme a bunch of years ago have left me feeling a little out of it. As Apple’s market share shrunk, only the Mac faithful and the Mac core user base — designers — came to Macworld in significant numbers. Productivity software and topics were out; design software and topics were in. I’m not a designer and I had little of value to share with conference attendees. I couldn’t come up with good ideas for conference sessions, so I just dropped out of the conference faculty.

Then, after a while, I just stopped coming to Macworld Expo. It didn’t seem worth the bother. I’d settled into a routine, writing revisions of a relatively large collection of books — mostly Visual QuickStart Guides — and that kept me busy. I didn’t need to go to the show to see what was new.

Instead, I’d tune into the live Webcast of the keynote address and learn about all the new products and features as Steve announced them while sitting at my desk, working on a book or another project.

Then Apple stopped doing the live Webcasts. I’d visit the Home page of Apple’s Web site after Steve’s gig and learn about the new stuff there. A while later, I’d download the Webcast and watch the show.

Things change. Apple’s introduction of innovative new products — starting with the original Bondi blue iMac all those years ago and the iPod much more recently — has gotten the Mac faithful excited about using Apple products again. Tiger was great; Leopard is pretty darn good, too. The ability of Intel-based Macs to run Windows effectively — either booted to Windows or while Mac OS X is running, as is possible with Parallels desktop — has gotten the attention of Windows users who are pretty unimpressed with the long-awaited Vista operating system. (Can you blame them?) Now Macs can run their Windows software. People are switching from Windows PCs to Macs. The Mac market share is growing.

This is great news for me. Although I write about Windows topics, I much prefer working with and writing about Macs. And with more Mac users comes more Mac-compatible products. In fact, there are more than a few software products that I use daily — TextWrangler, Scrivener, ecto 3 (in beta), EvoCam, iShowU, and Time Palette come to mind — that are only available for Mac OS. This not only gives me more great software to to choose from, but it gives me more Mac software to write about.

And that’s a good thing. Back in the early 90s, there were still lots of new computer users, people who needed step-by-step instructions for using software like Microsoft Word and Excel. Nowadays, these programs are old hat. Kids use them in school, for heaven’s sake! They don’t need books. And many of my old productivity titles are starting a slow spiral down to the backlist, never to be revised again.

So I’m going to Macworld. And I’m speaking at the Peachpit booth (on Wednesday, January 16, at 2 PM) about my new Leopard book and the cool things I’ve done with Leopard and Mac OS X.

But I’ll also be looking around at what’s new and exciting, ready to grab on to something different, something that’ll drag me deeper into the Mac community again.

It’s good to be a Mac user.

[Mostly] Unmissed Words

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Weekend Assignment #197: Missing Words

The question:

Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What show do you miss most, aside from reruns?

The writer’s strike isn’t affecting me much at all. I’m not a big TV viewer. In fact, there are only three shows I watch with any regularity:

  • The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
  • The Colbert Report
  • Boston Legal

Of these, the only one I sorely miss is The Daily Show. Jon Stewart’s take on the news is a real wake-up call. Only he can make it clear how absurd things are getting in this country and the world.

Although I enjoy Colbert, I can take him or leave him.

Boston Legal didn’t start going into reruns until recently — at least I don’t think so. For all I know, it might still be running new episodes.

I watch all television on DVR (Dish Network’s version of TiVo). I absolutely cannot tolerate commercial breaks. We have our DVR set up to record the programs we watch, then, when we have time to watch them, we do. I’d gotten into the habit of watching Stewart and Colbert each night, the day after the show was “taped.” When the writer’s strike hit, we just turned off the DVR timers so the reruns wouldn’t fill the hard drives.

Last night, I asked my husband to turn on the timers for David Letterman. He’s back at work now with his writers and would probably make a good substitute for Jon Stewart.

I occasionally watch science, technology, and history shows in PBS, Discovery, History, etc. But I don’t think any of those are new and have no idea if any of that kind of programming is affected by the strike.

I should mention that my husband watches a lot of television — at least 2 to 3 hours an evening. He’s perfectly happy with reruns (apparently) but also watches sports and movies. He also has a much higher tolerance for commercials and can even watch live television.

Extra Credit: how are you spending the time instead?

I’m definitely spending more time reading. I’m preparing for my helicopter Instrument rating, which requires me to read and understand a lot of very unintuitive material — things like tracking VORs, making procedure turns, and doing other things I still don’t quite get. So each evening, I settle down with one of my study guides and read a chapter or two. Sometimes I take notes.

Yesterday, we bought an easy chair for the bedroom so I wouldn’t have to read in bed. Reading this stuff in bed puts me to sleep.

As a writer, I’m siding with the writers. I believe that writers should get royalties or residuals (or whatever they’re called in this instance) on anything they write that’s sold. While some people argue that it might only be pennies per episode of a show that’s sold on iTunes (for example), a lot of pennies do add up to dollars. If a writer is involved in a hit television show that sells millions in the digital markets, why shouldn’t they benefit?

For the record, I’d love to write for television. One of my dreams is to be part of a research and writing team for an educational show on Discovery or PBS. I could do that. And I’d love to go on the road to some of those exotic places while they filmed scenes and talked to experts and locals. Great stuff.

Ah! Something to Write About!

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I find a Web site that offers weekly suggestions for blogging topics.

A little over a month ago, a Twitter friend (@desertlibrarian) tweeted about an hysterically funny blog post she’d read on John Scalzi‘s blog, Whatever. This led me to subscribing to the RSS feed for Whatever. Scalzi’s apparently a hardcore SciFi author and although I enjoy some SciFi now and then, I’ve never read any of his books. (He’s probably never read any of my books, either.) His blog posts about SciFi don’t interest me very much (sorry!), but his thoughtful and well-written commentaries about other things — such as the Creation Museum — make it well worth keeping the feed subscription.

It seems that Mr. Scalzi had been keeping another blog or site that featured a “Weekend Assignment.” Here’s his summary of that feature from a recent post on Whatever:

For those of you who used to read By The Way, you’ll know that every Thursday I wrote up a “Weekend Assignment” to give folks something to do with their blogs over the weekend (Friday – Sunday, for AOL Journals, was typically the time period in which the members posted the least). I’m not doing the Weekend Assignments anymore, but I’ve bequeathed the activity to Karen Funk Blocher (aka Mavarin), and she’s doing them on her blog now. The first of her Weekend Assignments is up, and it’s asking what people are doing with their time in the wake of the WGA strike.

It seems like just yesterday that I wrote an almost pointless blog post about how much trouble I sometimes had finding something to write about. And then I find this.

So, if you’ll pardon me, I’ve got something to write.

The Rise of Idiot America

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Why the Internet might save us all.

Two days ago, I took a considerable amount of time out of my day to read an article in Esquire by Charles P. Pierce, “Greetings from Idiot America.” The article, which was published in October 2005, was long, well researched, and well written. It used lots of multi-syllable words, which I’ve grown unaccustomed to reading. It shamed me, in fact, that I had to slow down and read certain passages more than once to get the full meaning.

When I finished reading, I felt a mixture of emotions: sadness, outrage, relief. I was sad because, for the past three or four years, I’ve been thinking hard about the topics Mr. Pierce covers in his article and I agree with most of what he says. It isn’t good news. I felt outraged because what he outlines and exposes is a planned attack against knowledge and science by those seeking money or power (or both).

This paragraph sums it all up for me:

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

But I also felt relief — relief that there were people out there who were thinking and could see what was happening, and could put those thoughts and observations into words in a place where others could find and read them. People like Mr. Pierce. Words like this article. Places like highly respected magazines and the Internet.

What It’s All About

“Greetings from Idiot America” starts with a discussion of the Creation Museum and the scene on the day when its “charter members” each paid $149 to see exhibits that included dinosaurs wearing saddles. These people came from as far away as Canada. They came with their home-schooled children as a “field trip.” They came to view exhibits that would legitimize their belief that the Bible’s book of Genesis is an absolute fact.

I’ve never been the the Creation Museum and never plan to go. I don’t want to support it with my money — money I’ve earned through logical thinking and sharing my knowledge by writing books and articles. But John Scalzi visited it not long ago. And his written discussion and photo tour are highly recommended reading and viewing. While Mr. Pierce writes about the museum before it was completed two years ago, Mr. Scalzi brings us up to date with a complete picture of the finished product. Dinosaurs with Adam and Eve are only part of the situation.

Mr. Pierce goes on to discuss various events in recent political history that support his theory. He ticks off point after point. A thinking person can’t help but be amazed that things like this have happened in our country, in our government, in the 21st century. It becomes clear why school systems can be conned into believing that Intelligent Design might just be another valid theory — even though evolution has mountains of real evidence to back it up. Or why America has slipped from being a leader in science — when we’re more interested in Britney’s custody battles or the latest American Idol.

In his article, Mr. Pierce reminds us:

Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with politics and religion. America cured diseases. It put men on the moon. It thought its way ahead in the cold war and stayed there.

I’m in that age group. I watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the surface of the moon. I was eight years old and I didn’t fully understand the significance of what was going on. I recall watching a scene that included the leg and ladder of the lunar module sitting on the surface of the moon. The picture was black and white and not very good. We waited a long time for something to happen. There was static with the voices, along with a lot of weird, high-pitched beeping. It was boring. It was late. I wanted to go to sleep. But my mother made me and my sister sit up and watch it. It was history in the making. It was proof that America was a country of great thinkers and doers. In less than ten years, we’d accomplished the goal the late President Kennedy had set for us.

Sadly, our current president won’t set any goals for us at all.

Mr. Pierce interviewed Professor Kip Hodges at MIT:

“My earliest memory,” Hodges recalls, “is watching John Glenn go up. It was a time that, if you were involved in science or engineering — particularly science, at that time — people greatly respected you if you said you were going into those fields. And nowadays, it’s like there’s no value placed by society on a lot of the observations that are made by people in science.

“It’s more than a general dumbing down of America — the lack of self-motivated thinking: clear, creative thinking. It’s like you’re happy for other people to think for you. If you should be worried about, say, global warming, well, somebody in Washington will tell me whether or not I should be worried about global warming. So it’s like this abdication of intellectual responsibility — that America now is getting to the point that more and more people would just love to let somebody else think for them.”

Pierce goes on to say:

The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it’s tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity’s sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson’s disease.

I see the truth and tragedy in this. Do you?

On Flying Spaghetti Monsters

I should probably mention here that I’ve also begun following the blog, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (CotFSM). According to Wikipedia:

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (also known as the Spaghedeity) is the deity of a parody religion called The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its system of beliefs, “Pastafarianism”. The religion was founded in 2005 by Oregon State University physics graduate Bobby Henderson to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution.

In an open letter sent to the education board, Henderson professes belief in a supernatural creator called the Flying Spaghetti Monster which resembles spaghetti and meatballs. He furthermore calls for the “Pastafarian” theory of creation to be taught in science classrooms.

One of the features of the CotFSM blog is the reprinting of “love mail” and “hate mail” received by Mr. Henderson. I read a bunch of posts the other day.

The love mail is an interesting mix from atheists (which you’d expect) and religious people who “get it.” All agree that neither Intelligent Design nor Creationism should be taught in schools. In fact, they all agree that religion should not be part of a public school education at all.

The hate mail is amazing. I really can’t describe it any other way. The majority of it consists of angry tirades penned by religious fundamentalists. Some of them seem to realize that the CotFSM is a joke or parody while others apparently believe that the CotFSM has real believers — in other words, they just don’t “get it.” Either way, they’re united in their belief that supporters of the CotFSM will go to hell. (Not surprising, I guess. What else is there for “sinners”?)

But what bothers me about some of the hate mail is the complete lack of literacy. Here’s a recent example:

wow you people are crazy i pray to my LORD jesus christ that you people wake up God created man in his own image and im sorry but if you look like noodles with meatballs growin out your BUTT you need to go back to SPACE or get back in the pan where you’ll be somebodys dinner!

people will believe anything!!

i am verryyy happy i was well homeschooled becuase i would be in jail for punching a teacher in the face when she tried to tell me about this so called spagetti monsterr!

i hate to be the breaker of bad news but when you look around when u die u wont be with your master meatball you’ll be burning in the pits of HELL and i am a REAL christian and that hurts to know that so many people are gonna be in hell! over a random guy that started a joke and has nothing better to do besides make up some god for fun then see how many people are loving this idea.
God bless you wacked out meatball loving freaks!
-christy

Wow, this person is illiterate. I guess grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are optional in the home where she was schooled.

And this is what worries me about the future of our country. As more and more people pull their kids from school in favor of home schooling or pressure their school systems to teach non-science “theories,” the average intelligence of our population drops. Christy (assuming she spelled her own name right; I’m making an educated guess on the capitalization) might be an extreme example of the problem, but she’s out there. How many others like her are building and populating Idiot America?

Read it and Weep

If you’re concerned about America and what’s been happening to it for the past decade or so, you owe it to yourself to read “Greetings from Idiot America.”

But don’t stop there. Get your thinking friends to read it. Discuss it. Blog about it. Get these issues out into the open.

It took me more than two years to stumble upon this article. Why? Could it be that I’ve been sucked into Idiot America, too?

But thanks to the Internet, it was still out there, waiting for me — and you — to find it.