Omnifocus: I’m still freaking

Regular readers know that I have this semi-unhealthy, love-hate thing going on with Omnifocus. The application in question, which is based on the  buzzword-compliant GTD worldview,  is a really good example of how some programs can look good and be useful at the same time (think Pamela Anderson with HTML coding skills).

So, the Omnifocus application is all about helping people track the stuff that needs a’ trackin’, and categorize those things that need to fit into categories, etc. But that’s vague; let’s look at an example.

Let’s say that you have a long list of stuff that you need to do, and some of that stuff has to happen on or before certain dates. Obviously, some of those “tasks” are more important than others. A user might have “clean the garage” listed as a task, as well as “schedule a meeting with the CEO”. So, it’s sort of a given that the whole garage thing is probably less important than the other task. But Omnifocus doesn’t allow for any visual indicator to advise the user. In other words, there are no arrows, stars, bullets or marks.

Other programs, and I’m thinking specifically of iGTD here, do offer that functionality.  Some time ago, we went cruising through the Omnifocus forums, and stumbled upon a post in which one user (it wasn’t me) made similar noises, lamenting the fact that there was no way to indicate priority or importance, as with other programs of this ilk. A forum member responded by suggesting that having stars and stuff (for importance) wasn’t “canonical”. I am so not making that up. He actually used the word “canonical”.  In general, I would mock this person, but it’s just way too easy on this one. I’m gonna walk-it-off.

The big moral of the story, I suppose, is that sometimes, it’s better to learn to work within a new framework, even if it seems alien and weird, initially. I still think that having some kind of importance indicator might improve an already great application. Comments?