I’ve used most of last year trying to fix my task management system (or ), after multiple periods of both Things, OmniFocus and various other systems (including paper, Agenda, some text file based ones etc). I’m now mostly at a good place with it.

To be honest it all probably started to break down in the latter half of 2022. Starting ADHD medication made a lot of things I’ve been overcompensating about very overwhelming.

Things

It was in Things until the new version of OmniFocus came out. My main reason for changing then, and now, is custom perspectives. If things had a way to have more custom views in the side bar as in Yesterday, Tomorrow or something like the searches you can do in shortcuts I’d probably still be there.

Plus I really miss having real support for flagging and putting projects on hold. My solution in Things was to just push them out with their “date” field (why not call them defer dates?!).

And OmniFocuses forecast view is so much better.

Also some other minor annoyances with Things:

• Their defer dates are so fucking weird. They have a date, until it is today and then it is just today forever. And you can set tonight, but on only the current day.
• I always miss being able to write tasks as an outline when I use it; like you can get around it, kind of. But having nested folders, projects, and nested tasks is way more flexible than Areas, Projects, Heading, Tasks and Checklists.

Checklists

The one weird thing about my system is that I have a bunch of ridiculous checklist templates that I use to generate daily, weekly, monthly etc checklists for various parts of my life. They are not recurring tasks or projects because I think it is easier to deal with them when I just generate them once a week based on needs.

In addition I have regular Projects. Plus work stuff. Shopping lists. And various more bucket list like things.

The checklists are just generated with task paper plus some shortcuts that insert due dates etc before sending them to OmniFocus. For the rest I set some defer dates (mostly in the checklists to be honest) and for the rest I just put anything except what I’m focusing on right now as Paused. And I have various tags to make it easy to manage through the OmniFocus filtering.

Projects

The way I manage things is that for actions in my “Projects” section (meaning not checklists, not shopping lists etc) have a hard limit of 150 actions. If there is more than 150 available, I need to pause or defer something. And I also put due dates on things more as a reminder if I should pause or drop it.

In order to avoid me doing a tiny bit on a shit load of things I try my best to complete projects before taking in new stuff.