Planning your life
I like task managers. I think I have bought or subscribed to almost all of them. They are all well thought-through and good, but none of them works for a 100% me. I’m probably not the only one in that situation and I suspect that is why paper journals have such a resurgence.
I’m using a Moleskine as a bullet journal at my day job for two months now and I have to admit it beats my previous task management in OmniFocus in many ways. Why? Information comes often in an unstructured way from different sources and logging it just sequentially is much faster than figuring out how to structure it in OmniFocus.
Unfortunately that works only well, when I sit at a desk where I can have my notebook open next to me. But I don’t want to carry a large, heavy notebook with me at all times, so I want a digital alternative.
But what? Against better knowledge I tried OmniFocus once more, this time in a more casual way, just to track day-to-day activity. OmniFocus is certainly capable of that, but it really wants to be your one-stop goto place for everything you have to do in your life. Unsurprisingly I was quickly tempted again to put more and more in there to have everything in one place.
The problem here is that it is significant effort to keep things up to date, because OmniFocus is not the golden source for all tasks. For example, many tasks are initiated by email and can often more efficiently managed with something like a snooze function. You could only manually sync it up with tasks and projects in OmniFocus, but this is extra work and error-prone.
Another source I use is Trello for shared projects. OmniFocus does not support multi-user projects, but even if it did, chances are that your collaborators want to use different tools. Again, you can sync it up manually at extra effort.
In the end all what I want is a daily list with the tasks for the day and a facility to be reminded of important tasks in the future. If I have to do this mostly manually anyway, I don’t really need a task management tool as powerful as OmniFocus. Any note taking app or even a piece of paper in combination with a simple reminders app, like the one that comes on the Mac and the iPhone will do.
(There is a tool called Pleexy that can automatically sync Todoist or Wunderlist with various sources, including Gmail and Trello).
