2012-09-19: Switching from OmniFocus to Org-Mode

One of my joys in life is keeping a TODO list and checking off stuff. When I was young, I used plain text files mainly, but when I got to graduate school, I used more automatic approaches.

In this post, I discuss my journey through various TODO list managers, culminating in my switch from OmniFocus to Org-Mode.

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My first foray into automated systems was a hand-written system called The Grid. This was a system for keeping track of your obedience to a daily regime. Check out this tour to see how it worked. You would add a list of things to do and then there’d be a box to check of every day. From my Grid in the tour, you can see that mine were: Kiss Claire (my girlfriend at the time), Eat a new meal, Wake up before 7am, Goto sleep before 11pm (I wasn’t good at that), Cardio-exercise, Weight training, SET (the card game), Shuffle cards (I wanted to learn how to, so I practiced every day), Write left-handed, Speak a foreign language, Write a foreign language, Read a scientific paper, Program, Read literature, Dance!, Smell the flowers, Talk to my family, and Pray.

This was awesome and I really enjoyed it.

Eventually, I wanted to keep track of more things, especially longer term things, so I started using OmniFocus for the Mac. It was pretty awesome and I enjoyed it. Eventually when the iPhone came out and I got one, I got it for the iPhone. But it was pretty terrible on there, because the synchronization time was unbearable for my huge list.

I switched to using OmniFocus instead of the Grid when I realized that I could make tasks repeat on a daily basis, and then have their "scheduled" time also repeat and be in the morning. This would make it so that when I completed a task for Monday, it would repeat again on Tuesday, but be hidden until then. Unfortunately, this made the list bigger and bigger every day, because each completed task was an entry in the OmniFocus database.

Nevertheless, I totally converted over to OmniFocus.

I enjoyed it for a while, but some things started to be very annoying. The main one was that it was incredibly slow: Synchronizing between my computers was slow, going from an item in Agenda mode to its place in the TODO list was slow, searching was INCREDIBLY slow, and there weren’t enough keyboard commands.

I researched some other options and eventually decided to experiment with switching to Org-Mode inside of Emacs.

The main thing to do was to make the interface look as much link OmniFocus as possible. Most of the options built-in to Org-Mode weren’t good enough though, but there were two hooks that I could use: the org-agenda-before-sorting-filter-function and org-agenda-cmp-user-defined.

org-agenda-before-sorting-filter-function is run on all the items that will be displayed on the agenda before they are sorted... as the name suggests. I programmed mine to (a) remove "TODO" from the displayed text, because otherwise they all would display it, (b) give it a color based on when it was due modeled after the OmniFocus colors, and (c) remove it if it was not passed the scheduled time. (c) is important, because even though Org-Mode claims to have an option that does this, it only looks at the scheduled date, not the scheduled time.

org-agenda-cmp-user-defined is used to order them and you can’t, by default, order by the deadline, which I wanted.

Then, I made it so the keybinding I use to view the TODO list (from anywhere in Emacs) automatically starts column mode and the column format hides everything except the deadline.

This has solved every problem I had with OmniFocus: it does everything the same but is lightning fast.

There’s one feature it doesn’t have that I like, but that I’ve worked around. OmniFocus has parallel and ordered task lists, but Org-Mode only has parallel. This just means duplicating some deadlines.

There’s a feature that neither have, but with Org-Mode I can add it myself: the ability to skip the weekend for daily repeating tasks. I hope to do this eventually, but I don’t have it yet.

You can see my Org-Mode customization starting on L518 on Github.