Why OmniFocus - GTD Summer Series Part 2 - Episode #307 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:11 Jason Atwood: This is the 307th episode of Crock Books Weekly for the 4th week of July 2019. This episode is titled, Why OmniFocused? I'm your host Jason Atwood joining me, co-host. Feeling the middle of the summer. Looking like you got a little tan there. You had a good July 4th, three, four weeks ago.

Justin Edelstein: Justin Edelstein and Justin, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you. Yeah, I did have. He actually is looking in his arms. I'm pretty tan. Looking pretty good.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. I like it. Feeling good. There you go. You've had some time up in the Berkshires. Oh, it's been lovely. I mean the ending to the Women's World Cup. Can't believe the way that happened. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine? But we don't discuss that on this podcast. So we can't go over that. So this is the second part in the four part series summer series GTD summer series. Last time we talked about the GTD summit and one of the things I talked about was meeting Ken Case, CEO of Omni Group. And we've never, so we've talked a lot about the different pieces of GTD. We've talked about capture and clarifying. We've talked about week reviews. We've talked about two-minute rules. And we have a couple coming up that are going to be talking about calendars and what's the list?

Jason Atwood: And commitments. But I really wanted to do one just on OmniFocus. First of all, I did write a blog post for OmniGroup, which is now up on their website, which is under there. It's all inside OmniFocus, and there's a blog post about that. So it's up on the OmniGroup website. It's called, in the inside OmniFocus. There's a whole bunch of external writers write. figure out which tool they want to use for their sort of project and tasks. And so I've dug into a couple of these other ones, other people come to me, say, hey, have you tried this? And so I go look at it and every time I do one of those, I do come back to OmniFocus and I go, oh, this is why I use OmniFocus because these these set of features and we'll talk about what those are and why I think they're important and maybe some of of the downsides and things that could be made better.

Justin Edelstein: Sounds good to me. Why don't you, I mean, you know, the Omni group way better than I do having been, I've been a Mac user now for about 10 years, maybe more you've been a Mac user. You never, a probably never switched. Commodore 64. Right. But then when you got a Mac, you probably never went back to Okay, only at. Only at- only at work where it was sort of required.

03:21 Jason Atwood: So I- And I was never 95 because at work it was NT4- Oh yeah. Or NT- NT, right, to like 98 or something. Then it went- yeah, went to NT4 and then something else. Anyway.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, so I never really had foothold, you know, a thing. Also, I wasn't really using... GTD back then but you have been doing GTD for what 15 years

Jason Atwood: Ish so 2004 to 2019 let's call it fit for all that fit you probably take a year of maybe kind of ends it out in the beginning before I Became that'll happen and Omni

Justin Edelstein: Group is a software company that makes software exclusively for the Apple let me call the apples Suite

Jason Atwood: Of platforms and operating systems makes them interesting is they were actually a next developer So they use to develop software for next which was Company, so when Steve Jobs left Apple Actually left or kicked out of Apple if you ever saw it kicked out the movie or whatever he goes off and creates next which is a Again, it was the next thing. It was Apple 2.0. Very expensive, very high-end boxes, and then they had their own operating system. And Omni Group started and built software for the next platform. So they bought, I mean, one of the ones that I remember from way back when that they ported immediately was OmniWeb, was a web browser, which actually had a lot of fun features in it for what it did back then. on. When Steve Jobs comes back to Apple, he then buys up next and then uses the software, the OS, as a component or core of what is now OSX.

Jason Atwood: So this thing that's now 15 years old, he's used he used the core of that. So they as army group. just went, oh, well, we now have this bigger platform. So they were one of the first developers to kind of get into the Mac OS development. Now they are now a hundred percent, as far as I know, iOS OS X, right? Developer shop and they, and they only build software for that platform. And so back in the day when I was starting, so I. Started GTD read the book and walk you through this because I'm not gonna have a whole lot to say on this podcast So I

Justin Edelstein: Want to get a couple words in here. Okay, sure at the beginning at the very least Okay so just When you read the book, yes, did you start with? The folders and the labelers and all the things in the book that are very old school with the 43 folders and this that

Jason Atwood: The other Almost doing I was almost going to do a terrible demonstration. Yes. I started with the whole thing. I did the whole thing over a weekend the apartment the The label maker the folders the manila folders the whole thing. Putting it all in a physical inbox. I bought a file folder, like a two drawer, and put it all in. Yes, I did all that.

Justin Edelstein: And then, at what point did you decide, or was it suggested to you that, hey, this doesn't need to be like a physical paper thing. You can like all these projects and these lists and these things can go into a digital system. Like at what point did you decide to make that happen for yourself?

06:39 Jason Atwood: I never use the folders as a replacement for lists. I use them for reference. So I put it things in the reference material, but for all my tasks and projects, I always use digital. Did you use like a Palm pilot? So yeah, I had a I had a POM pilot and I think we were in, well so in 2004, we were way beyond, like I think we were off the first couple versions of POM. Because I remember I had one back in 97. I had the POM 5000, so that was way before that. So I was now into like probably the POM, maybe trio or something like that, the one that actually could sync with the... with the operating, like physically it could sync up to the Mac and that was great because I could have, you know, a task on my palm and then my UVic was captured and then it would sync to my desktop.

Jason Atwood: Oh my goodness! Like it was brilliant and contacts and things like that.

Justin Edelstein: And at that time you were... You were kind of split, right? Because you had your work and then you had life and separated in in your systems. Is that an accurate assessment or were you able to sort of bridge that gap somehow?

Jason Atwood: Well, back then, I think I was just using it more for life, working more using it for life, but I was capturing tasks and things into what the one system. There was one point much later actually when you were around that I had I actually kept two different systems for yeah for For the group or for you know, I kept I had it I used Outlook and the system for using Outlook and then I used OmniFocus on my Mac side and I had like two week reviews and I had two that's when people say well I don't know how to do I work your thing. You can just split it out just You have your work stuff and you have your home stuff. I think it's better to have one system, but if you physically can't because your system won't allow you and they won't allow you to get to some sort of website to track it, then have two systems, have two-week reviews.

Jason Atwood: I used to do one early on Friday morning for work. I remember. I used to get a lot of emails on Friday. And then I do one on Saturday.

Justin Edelstein: Great. And when you decided, okay, it's time to move away from these folders, and I want to see if I can digitize this. capture process, you had your palm, but then there's a level beyond that where it's like, okay, this isn't just existing on a palm pilot. This has to exist in a bigger thing that I can kind of get to in a more ubiquitous way. Where'd you go? Like, well, how'd you find this thing?

Jason Atwood: There's this place back then. What's it called? The internet? Yeah, it's called the internet. And I was listening to things and, you know, reading blog posts and Merlin man and his 37. folders, or 36, 35, 37 folders, his website, and I was reading all his blog posts about It's called Kinkless GTD. I was like, ooh, Kinkless GTD? That sounds cool. What is that? And what it was was someone had taken another product of Omni Groups called Omni Outliner, which was an outline product. You could have a thing underneath it and a thing underneath that. It's a planner, but it was really well done and a very, very good system. But it had these things called templates. So someone had written up a template that took Omni Outliner and made it into a GTD system and Had some pretty cool little it has some neat features to it.

10:12 Jason Atwood: You could do folders of. Rek The big thing that, that gets a a task manager beyond a task manager into something you can actually use for GTD is the is the theory of having. is a hierarchy of having a project, when I'm putting my hand here, and then things things underneath the project, things that go to that project. And most task managers don't have that. They have a task and then another task, and you can't put tasks underneath. In fact, on the operating system that we use right now, like coming the next release, coming in September, you're actually going to be able to put tasks underneath tasks. So like that's, you would think like, Oh that's a big... It's a big theory, but in order to really, the GTD, you need to have these things called projects, tasks are underneath projects.

Jason Atwood: So kind of thinking that hierarchy, this is one of the first things I could do it. Kinkless. Kinkless GTD.

Justin Edelstein: And that was, again, that was more of a, I guess not a hack. It was a template that somebody created that you could then leverage to...

Jason Atwood: Bend it into group is watching this people now people are buying Omni Outliner a lot and and they're watching it in their forums I'm. They're like what's going on? Why are people all using this for this and They realize that there was a demand for a tool that could do this, right? So I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I mean I kind of do because I've been watching it happen, but they basically said, Oh, we're going to go create our own take. They basically took the code, I think of Omni Outliner and then built a GTD focused application for, for managing GTD and focus OmniFocus. That's how I was born. I was in the betas of it for, I mean, it was baited forever. And, and it had some really great You know, features, it had some stuff that just, and we'll talk about, we'll get out of the history and we'll talk about what I can do now.

Justin Edelstein: It's now on version three, but think about that. That was, that was a while ago. I remember when it first came out and you and I were talking, I think it was in your office and this was before I was practicing GTT and you were, you, you were doing your best to try to get me there. And you dropped the book on my desk a few times. and,, a And imagine when you start walking and you're passing your grocery store, which it'll know because it knows your location, it could alert you to be like, hey Justin, you're at the grocery store, you have three things you could do right here if you had five minutes. And I was like, oh. That is cool. And I remember thinking like, all right, let me see what this is all about.

13:42 Justin Edelstein: And that was that was early on it was more the it the it was more the tech grab than the other stuff that today I would talk about in terms of you know, mine like water and clearing space, etcetera, but- it was more the, ooh this is a geeky fun thing and if I just use this tool it will tell me like what to do like oh I'm near a phone what phone calls do I need to make that was like very old school thing but but in terms of GTD but it still applies right,,, because I'm sitting with a phone. I'm always with a phone. But I remember that very specifically, like, hey, location. It's easy to sit here with a piece of paper and get everything out of my brain I can write it all down Well, So, So I just talked about some of them, but we're maybe give us three or more.

Justin Edelstein: That help you. That help you. Like this is the thing, I'm not moving off of it because it does these features awesome.

Jason Atwood: Sure. Why don't I start with all the stuff that it does that you just so you all know. First of all, it is only, it is only, there have a web version now. There's web, but there is no PC. There's no Android. So I know for a lot of people, it's not just.

Justin Edelstein: It's act right.

Jason Atwood: And there's, there's no Android and there's no PC so just. for those i know that's for most people opera thanks for downloading and, and I'll talk it does it does It does that. It does obviously tasks. It does context which they now have renamed in tags and you can do multiple tags per either project or Or tasks it has folders for organizing so you can put folders of your projects So these are all just basics it has a syncing engine in the background that can synchronize between your systems On one system, it'll then show up on the other system. You do it on here. It shows a bear. It sinks across all the systems. And it sinks very well. We always say, sinking is hard. They do sinking very, very well. It also works with the Apple ecosystem in that you can use the woman's name, talk to her on your phone or whatever, and then It will pick that up and put it in and understands that.

16:49 Jason Atwood: And you can talk so you can capture tasks very quickly. And they will go right into your OmniFocus. These are like, but a lot of things, a lot of places will do these. Sort of the basics. You can set things to start, you give it dates, you can have calendar integration. so those are just, that's like what everything does. It has super tons of features. Now let's talk about the stuff. that I would think. And again, we looked at another three, four weeks ago. We did, while over there. Last month, we looked at one called Nirvana and we looked at the developer was there and we were talking to him. And I think when everybody's someone shows something, they're like, oh, here's what it can do. So, oh, also it's offline. So when it's on your iOS device or on your desktop, you don't have to be connected to the internet to interact with it.

Jason Atwood: No. Right?. So- but here's some of the things

Justin Edelstein: That I think- OmniFocus and set it far apart from everything else and-

Jason Atwood: You know chime a month ago, or two months ago.

Justin Edelstein: I can't get to my phone, I can't get to my desktop, If you just want to have tasks,

Jason Atwood: You don't need this. You just literally need tasks. You can bring in, and they brought in Merlin Mann. They have worked with David Allen. They have built setup guides. So this is something that's different from most. most task managers didn't think of themselves as working with GT and I think you can see that in R the software when you use it. Some big ones some like the ones that again, I think yep The number one killer feature killer dealer killer dealer. Let's do it three, but so number one is is Repeating and you say what's repeating was repeating mean to me? Well an omni-folk as I can take things that happen on on a schedule, right, that happen either every 10 days or every whatever. And in the GTD world, I take something that's on my brain, I then put it into my trusted system, and I tell OmniFocus, this needs to repeat at this interval, right?

Jason Atwood: It needs to come a daily, take it take your pill. weekly, you know, water the plants, yearly, get ready for your, you know, Mother's Day or your wife's birthday or whatever, or every five years years, you know, renew your driver's license or whatever. And you can put it into the system and it a very granular on how it can repeat. It has... super granular. So you can say when it's completed, you can say repeat on a certain schedule every third Thursday. So if you think of GTD as I want to get this stuff out of my head and not have my head worrying about things like when I have to feed the cat or give it its medicine or when I have to renew the license or when I have to, I mean I have one today at my washer dryer there's a little water trap on the bottom of it.

20:26 Jason Atwood: And you have to empty it. If you don't empty it, all of a sudden, think you... water starts coming out of the So you have to empty everything so often. I have it set for every three weeks. I don't remember it because I don't have to. It just shows up every three weeks. And I did it this morning and I'm like, oh my goodness, it's full. So OmniFocus, you can do it. And what's nice about it is once you set them. I'll move to the second. to to to to to to to to to to No. No. No. to the Nirvana software and I said, oh, repeating. is, the second one. It's perspectives. What is a perspective? So again, this is a very GTD thing, but really let's just break it down what it does is a pro feature.

Jason Atwood: Custom perspectives. Well, I'm going to talk about the thing you should buy. If you're going to buy OmniFocus or at least try it, but okay. The is, is custom perspectives. They are basically Let's go to the Salesforce world. So we have a thing. They are customized list views. They're filters. Their ability to say, show me this and not this. Show me all this. Show me all my calls I need to do tomorrow. Show me all my projects that are starting next week. Show me whatever. And you build them like a list view. You name them. And then you can jump into them. and get a perspective. So I have one called Arkus and I have it on a key command and it just shows me all my Arkus stuff. So I want to focus just an Arkus.

Jason Atwood: Boom, key command, focus on Arkus. Ooh, another one. Boom, focus just on home stuff. So I can literally show, tell OmniFocus just to show me just the stuff I need to see. Just show me the stuff that's due today. Integrate it with my calendar. Forecast view, right? Just show me, show me things in my weekly review. I look at ones that are like... show me things that but it's sort of coming up and I go in the future and I get rid of them. So that's two. So perspectives are extremely powerful. I've been amazed. And actually the new version, OmniFocus 3, has much more customized, so you can put in a lot to them. And you can give them key commands, and you can give them icons, and they end, they synchronize. So your custom perspectives synchronize.

23:35 Justin Edelstein: Can I give one? Sure, you can. I mean, I asked you the question. I mean, I feel like quick entry is just the feature. Because if the information's coming at you hot and heavy, and things are just being thrown at you, ideas this you're having in your own head, ideas that are coming at you from other people, the ability to just hit a very quick key command. all throughout the operating system. So it's really at the OS level that you are capturing and quick entering things into your trusted system I'm going to process my inbox later, fine. Or do I want to like really take a second here and like put this in the right project, put this in the right tag or context, put a due date on it, and have it flow into the system that way.

Justin Edelstein: Just however you want. You can even attach things to it. You can put notes. Maybe it's a link. It's like, review this document. What document? This one, the link. Here's the link to the Google Doc. All that stuff, being able to capture it. is absolutely key from anywhere the and the I.O.at the OS level let's just explain that so so so very important so anywhere you are on your computer whether you are online offline on the web, in some other app wherever you are it it does not matter you click It's optioned in me and I think that's the default, no it's not the default, no I I train people because I've been trained to do that. Yes, because it's next to command space. But anyway. So that's the command for me. Whatever it is by default it is.

Justin Edelstein: And this little window pops up from literally anywhere. And it takes less than a second. Boom. There it. And you just type in your quick thing that you want to capture, hit enter and move on. Move on. That idea came in. You got it. Move on. It's such an empowering feeling to just be like, I got that. I got it. Now that I mean, I'll just move this to like a weird like capture moment, but I was. I was talking, you know, when we traveled, we, we Last month? Yeah, we did the vacation first, which was the race and all this other stuff. And I was talking to your wife who traveled with us and she was on a race. I bet her. Yeah, I'm sure you have.

Jason Atwood: Was she having a fit in the forest? No, this was before that. But I was telling her how...

Justin Edelstein: Packing for the trip was kind of challenging because it was sort of two trips. It was this vacation relay running race where I was gonna run like 20 miles and need it in three or four different legs so I needed like running clothes and then I needed like vacation lounge wear and then I needed like I'm going to this professional conference clothing so it was like sort of challenging So I was like, you know, the hardest part was the 45 minutes I spent sitting there, writing down all the things I needed to pack the day before I packed. The packing took me then about five minutes. So it was like, it took me 50 minutes to pack, but really the hard part was writing all the stuff down and she's like. Whoa, like you guys are so into this GTD.

27:07 Justin Edelstein: I just like throw things in the bag I bring a lot of extra whatever and I just totally forget things every, like Yeah, if you just like took the 45 minutes, it probably took you an hour glared anyway. It took me less like Exactly an hour a hour they're and then I quick capture, hack, look at the Evernote note, do tomorrow, zit at. a piece of reference material to then actually pack those things or I could just check them off one by one and it was Like this, I don't know maybe sparked something for for her perhaps perhaps probably But it was a big thing for me. Like Like. Like that's how I pack. So like that thinking is the hard part telling yourself to then go back to that list to actually do the physical the

Jason Atwood: The hardest part of GTD or the thing that what you don't want to do with GTD, is create any, any barrier, mental, physical or otherwise to capture. Because if you are truly using GTD and you truly want mine like water, you want that clear space, you want that break, you need to be able to capture super fast. That is why for me, because I live in a digital world, I focus wins, winner, winner, chicken dinner, is because anywhere, whether it's on my watch, using the woman's name, whether it's on the desktop with a quick key command that I can do faster than you can even open up a browser and log into whatever. task system there is or whether it's on my iOS device where it's sitting in my dock and I can press hold down force tap onto it and boom new new thing that's what I do and you can type, and it and you can even hit there's a button on the top that's that's save and new and they're like they'll bring you to another one so you can just go do do do save a new boom again this is where I think they have just They're really the best is because they've really thought through all these things, multiple capture,

Justin Edelstein: Quick capture, quick entry, how to get things into it. The views are awesome too. Like I live in, I'm going to open it up right now. I essentially live in the forecast. Yes, because it's got calendar integration. So at again, like, at these deep integration point levels, like I get to see my entire landscape, I get to see what's on my calendar all in order. And then what's due today? What are the tasks that are do like, so like people's birthdays like they're just in there because they're on the birthday calendar. So it's all there for me to interact with. And it's super simple for me to like drag things around and make turn a task into a project, put it into a different perspective. Like it's very simple to just maneuver and move things around.

30:32 Justin Edelstein: With that said, It's and maybe we'll get to this in a few minutes by cons Yeah

Jason Atwood: I'm gonna I'm gonna chime in on the con we're gonna have to con less But let me let me do the the one other killer feature again. Nobody else has oh, and I have ever seen What is it? It's called review mode review modes a good one. So what is review mode? Well In the world of OmniFocus, you can have projects, which are your big, larger outcomes in GTD world, right? You know, some trip you are going to take or something that comes up every day or, you know, feed the cat or mow the lawn or whatever. These projects are things that take more than one, action. again. make them, make them repeatable and you can have this thing. You can, and you can have statuses to them. You can put projects on something called hold.

Jason Atwood: You can have projects be dropped and you can have projects that are called deferred, meaning this, the day that they're supposed to pop up into your life is in the future. These are great because you can defer them out. And basically, it's my birthday, my birthday doesn't show up on my birthday. Haha, I'm going to take a trip or if we're going to take a But review mode for every project that you have, whether it's on pending, active, or on hold, you can set how often you want it to show up to be reviewed. So it's a perspective and it says, Hey, this thing, you just want to kind of look at it and Kind of have it kind of pop into your thing go. Do you want to do anything about this again? It could be on hold so it's gonna be something you say.

Jason Atwood: I don't want to do anything about It could be pending could be six months from now That's gonna pop up or it could be active and then OmniFocus tracks when you reviewed it and when you need to review it next And when you go to this perspective It shows you what you need to review and reviewing is just like literally clicking a button review review I looked at this.

Justin Edelstein: I looked at this. Okay. I saw this. Ooh But sometimes it sparks a ooh

33:34 Jason Atwood: So let's move it back to GTD in the GTD. We have a couple of things you have things that are kind of someday Maybes right someday, so I already told you how you kind of handle the OmniFocus like take a trip to on Dog's Head Island weekend, that place you went, right? That's in my OmniFocus. I have it set to review every six months because I don't wanna see it every week, but every six months it pops up, I look at the's, it's on hold, I go, do I want to do anything about this? And if I don't, I go, Mark reviewed, and I move on. Sometimes they pop up and I'm like, oh, you know what? I mean, the best one is they pop up and go, oh, oh, and then I guess, quick, make active.

Jason Atwood: Now I'm going to take this on, right? I decided. And you can change. Do you want to review it once a month, once a year, once every six months? So like things that are like really like, renew passport, which is a project that shows up once every 10 years. I don't want to review that every six months. There's no point to that. I review it once a year just to see. And then like, oh, it's coming up in three years, so whatever. And a review once a year. Sometimes the best ones is when you're reviewing all these projects that are either pending or coming up or on hold and you really done them. to and you look at it like, oh, I've already done that quick Mark, done. And then you're done. So, that feature, that's a very GTD type.

Jason Atwood: Type of concept built in is tracked at the project level. There's a custom perspective. Can we unsus in the thing it says review all your projects. you know, now you don't really have that. I remember this interview.

Justin Edelstein: Find it somewhere. I mean he showed us his GTD system, which

Jason Atwood: Is basically his app, which was The problem is you throw way too much in there. I don't want to review 300 things every week. So in my week review, I definitely use the review thing, but the beauty of OmniFocus is you can say, based on the type of project, and I default mine to every two months, it defaults to I think every week, which I think is too little. I defaulted, I tell everybody when they set it up, set it to two months, and then you can change it. Again, a project that is, you know, me doing, I want to do the rock and roll half in Las Vegas. I don't need to look at that every two months, right? First of all, the race is only once a year. I basically need to look at it maybe once every six months because I'm going to decide whether I'm going to do it the next year.

37:04 Jason Atwood: And sometimes I look at it and go, oh, I. that feature is nowhere in any other software that I've ever seen. So those killer things, those three top hardware quick capture, review mode, and the extremely flexible repeating projects. is just where there's just no one I even know gets close. Let's talk about cons.

Justin Edelstein: So like the extreme flexibility brings some cons with it. Like Peter Parker with the extreme power. Yeah, it does bring some cons to the table. And so now I'm going to just bring this to Salesforce because I know that's like our primary audience most of the time. Imagine if you will Salesforce folks out there being given Salesforce and saying here you're an amazing salesperson now right here you go like really am I no And here, you're the Salesforce admin. You're an amazing admin. You don't know. Anything but here you go. You're now the admin Such a powerful tool Salesforce is such a powerful platform, right? What am I speaking like Yoda Yoda? Okay, so I just Yes If you don't really know what you're doing you could make some pretty ridiculous mistakes and some sort of weird decisions and you can all of a sudden gets sour on Salesforce pretty quickly if it's not set up correctly.

Justin Edelstein: So OmniFocus has that thing to it as well that it has so much power that at times you might over engineer it with the recurring or repeating things you might under engineer it because you're a little scared of all the features that are in there like that whole technology thing. I'm afraid to click that button. Not sure what that's going to do. Those are to me some of the cons. I also find that like differing with repeating sometimes gets a little screwy as it's sinking and like things will just pop up from like three years ago. And I'm like, where did this come from? And I just mark it. I'm like, delete it, whatever. I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it. It's so daunting for new users that it's, it is almost the barrier to adopting GTD is the system.

Justin Edelstein: And I try to pull people back from that folks I talked to and say, well, okay, pull back from the system because it's not the system, like start the concepts and just capture. And I know people make OmniFocus do jumping jacks. One of those people, your power user of OmniFocus. I don't think of myself as a power user of OmniFocus. I think of myself as a good user of OmniFocus. I know how it serves my needs really well, and I would not want you to take it away from me. How about that?

40:41 Jason Atwood: Right. I agree. That That is probably, I say the two biggest one is this complexity and probably the price of the two. If it were free, the top three cons, complexity, price,

Justin Edelstein: And platform. Right. You're on Apple, unless you're just going to do web stuff, but it's very limited in terms of what it can do. Well, two of the things we said... Yeah, you get a okay online version, but you don't get it to the power. So you get keyboard command, but you've got to be on the website, which is

Jason Atwood: You've got to be on the website, which is you've got to be on the website, which is you've got to be the website, Korg. they just started a subscription version of it. You can still buy standalone anything. They still have and I think they also have OmniFocus like regular and then OmniFocus Pro. I, everybody at Arkus gets OmniFocus Pro for iOS and for the Mac. They've made that easy now because now it is just a subscription. And once you subscribe. the $9.99 a month or the $99.99 a year, you get web, iOS, desktop,

Justin Edelstein: All three pro, which remember when the iPad and the iPhone were two different apps? apps. Apps? That cost?

Jason Atwood: A decent amount of And here's the thing and I'll always make this argument the argument I make the a a and I agree. But I will show you the new free hand, free hand, free hand,.........I really is the best and it really does the most and I hope you come and you're gonna pick the one that's the best like Because if you're gonna put something into your brain That's that is that important if you think of OmniFocus is that you're going to GTD this stuff is that important to you Right then $200 actually is nothing.

43:52 Justin Edelstein: If you think of it as your operating system then yeah

Jason Atwood: It's perfectly or perfectly like due to time value. Yeah. Like what a take your salary, chop it down by weeks, by, by the time, by hour. You can get down to what your hourly worth If you're a consultant, it's really easy. And then say, okay, if this thing saves me one HOUR a year, what's that worth? If it saves me, it's 10 HOURs a-year, what's that worth? A million dollars. Right. That's where I think you get to it. Again, there's no other tool. Right? That you could literally keep extending the value is something because I, I would also argue that if you're someone who pays for even Mac hardware and Mac, and that's why I think that's in the market there, iOS and iPhone, there's people pay for it because it has these abilities.

Jason Atwood: It's you know, these MacBook Pros aren't cheap, but they are very good. And the reason they're good is because the iOS is good. the operating system is good. And you get a lot out of it and you and you use this thing. I mean this thing I use 12 hours a day. It's just ridiculous how much I pound this machine and That's important to me. So again It's not the only one out there There's tons if you want to look at to-do lists you want to look at Nirvana you want to look at I think even using the iOS built-in It's called Reminders, the new version iOS 13 is going to have better features. They're fine and there's setup guides for those and you can use those, even paper is fine. But for me, in order to have, because I want the best and I have, I want all these things and I have put in, it's totally worth it and it is the only reason, it's the only thing I would ever use.

Jason Atwood: Okay, let's wrap it up. Well, that's our pick that week. That's the biggest pick of the week. We've ever done All right,

Justin Edelstein: You picked it a few times like I may focus on me focus to I'm in focus three I'm the focus beta me focus blab. I can't wait. I can't wait to pick OmniFocus for

Jason Atwood: Oh, oh the other thing is their support is very good. They answer emails I've literally never contacted them. They're very good. So that's actually something that is important. We think about support. Like you send an email. If you have a product, you should be able to support it. Human beings get back to you pretty quickly. They're very good. Their support is very good. So, and it's a good company that's been around for a long time. and they're really in on the platform. So anyway, all the good reasons. All right, so that's wraps it up for today. All right, keep going. We'll be back back in a couple weeks.

Justin Edelstein: We'll be back mid-August, I think. Yeah, with that third episode. Give us a couple weeks. And let us clear our head and think about this. Put it in my army focus.

Jason Atwood: Until then, it's Justin and Jason saying, Enjoy those cloudy days!

47:08 Justin Edelstein: You