For about 3 years now I’ve been using OmniFocus as my primary TODO management tool. As a personal TODO list OmniFocus is the most powerful one I have ever used, and I have tried many.

Dumping Ground

The biggest issue with OmniFocus is that it has just become a random dumping ground for things I would ‘like to do’ at some point. I no longer use it as a place to put all my information, but even trimming it back to what it’s meant for I have bunch of tasks sitting around that aren’t getting done.

No Real Time Management

Overall the issue with how I am managing the time I have against the TODO items. While OmniFocus does let you add time to the individuals TODO items it really doesn’t let you add the items to a calendar.

Sure you can put the due dates on a calendar but mapping out the time a particular item and the time it will take to finish it on the calendar. This means that the best intentions of getting things done on time often way too many things are booked in to a day which means that you’re not getting all of it done.

Having Things to a Calendar

I’ve been looking for a tool that really lets me put items on a calendar to book out my daily available time against the items that have to get done. Some of the options I am looking at are:

• OmniPlan (affiliate link}
• Merlin
• Daylite
• StudioMetry
• Process (affiliate link)

But I Want More

Really I want more than just a calendar though. One of the things I loved in [Daylite 4][day4] was the ability to track opportunities. OmniFocus simply was never built for this, and you can’t really ‘hack’ around it to get information out.

Each ‘opportunity’ lives as a task in my Client Follow Up project. They are each and island to themselves. Once you mark task as done, like emailing a contact again, it’s marked off and done. If they say no, there is no real way to track that no, and assign a why to it.

So I suppose what I really want is an end to end business management application as I look to push my solo business to the next level.