The recent outage at Dreamhost somehow killed my installation of Tracks, the web-based Ruby on Rails application that I had used for the past few years to manage my tasks and projects, following the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. I messed with it for a long time, even installing a new version locally and attempting to import my data (which still lives on the MySQL servers at DH). But it began to be a real waste of time, and I was getting tired of trying to resurrect it.
So I took the scorched earth approach and started over with OmniFocus, and I’m very happy with the software and the decision. I tend to favor web applications for portability and tweakability, but OmniFocus is so very nicely designed that I genuinely enjoy using it (and, with my education discount, don’t much mind paying for the privilege). Task management software isn’t sexy. But if you spend as much time as I do planing, organizing, and agonizing over tasks, the subtle niceties of the user interface save you time and take a lot of the pain out of it. Try a demo. It’s good for a fourteen days and there are some nice help vids on the site that will get you started.
Though I manage my lists and projects with software, I actually print out my lists and cary them around with me, folded up and clipped with a pen. This makes it easy to add new things and cross off ones I’ve accomplished. They make a version of OmniFocus for the iPod touch, but that would mean having to type with my thumbs and worrying about having a charged battery and such. Since the paper and pen approach works for me, having the software on my desktop rather than on a web server is fine. In fact, it just gives me another excuse to spend time with my iMac.