OmniFocus review

When it comes to time and task management, renowned international author and lecturer David Allen is the man to follow.

His wildly successful Getting Things Done approach has been adopted by thousands - and is the inspiration behind Omni's brand-new OmniFocus, a fine though not perfect, software task-management tool.

OmniFocus aims to manage your tasks so they don't get in the way of the rest of your life.

The best way to start is to enter all your upcoming tasks - called actions in the main OmniFocus inbox and 'brain dump' in Getting Things Done parlance. You then process those actions, turning the larger ones, which take multiple steps such as buying a house, into projects simply by dragging them into the sidebar in the program's Planning view. Individual actions can be assigned to these projects or new ones through a drop-down window in the inbox. The object: clear the inbox by assigning all actions to a project.

Dumping tasks into OmniFocus is only half the battle. You still need to work out when to do them. In OmniFocus, projects can be one of two types. Parallel projects let you complete any constituent action at any time, while the actions in sequential projects must be stepped through one by one. In the latter only the first item is shown as available; the others are greyed out.

In some ways OmniFocus is a glorified checklist: after all an action is completed simply by checking the box next to it. But OmniFocus actions are versatile. You can assign start and end times to them, then filter your inbox to show only those actions that have a certain duration. This means that you can see which tasks you can perform when you have limited time.

You can filter by a number of criteria and focus on one project, hiding others. You can save such a combination of filters, views and focus as a perspective and return to it through a menu command at any time.

Every action in OmniFocus also has a context field - the place you need to be to do it or the resources you need to complete it. You can add a new or existing context to an action through a drop-down menu, pre-populated with contexts such as 'home' and 'office'. Handily too OmniFocus offers smart matching with existing contexts as you type. It's quicker than auto-completion, as you don't have to enter letters sequentially.

You can switch the window view to see all actions in a Context mode, which groups actions into lists based on their context, such as your physical environment, people or time. This means that you can quickly view tasks that have to be done at a certain place or with a specified person.

Thankfully you don't always have to enter information in the main window of OmniFocus. A definable keyboard short cut brings up a floating quick-entry window where you can enter tasks, assign them to projects and send them to the OmniFocus inbox from anywhere on your Mac. The only caveat here - and it's significant - is that OmniFocus has to be running to call up the window. In addition you can send a rich text selection to the inbox from just about any Mac application through the Mac OS X Services menu.

For those who spend a lot of time away from their Mac, OmniFocus isn't perfect. For example, there's no .Mac sync feature to let you share tasks on multiple Macs.

One obvious but awkward workaround is to keep your OmniFocus database on a portable drive. But you can synchronise contexts and associated actions to iCal. It even enables you to keep different contexts in different calendars.