The Critical Path

So as a GTD devotee, a huge Apple fan and the new owner of a shinny iPod I set out to reinvent all that is good about my GTD habits in iPod land.

A very quick search of the app store, and some great reviews led me to Omni Focus, the GTD tool for both iPad and Mac. According to it’s makers the Omni Group “The iPhone OS version of OmniFocus (winner of Best iPhone Productivity Application at the WWDC 2008 Apple Design Awards) brings powerful task management functionality to users’ fingertips. With live, automatic syncing, location-aware custom actions lists, and on-the-fly task entry with voice notes and image capture, OmniFocus for iPhone is built to enhance your busy life. Access shopping lists, agenda items for work, tasks for home, or any other lists you need, wherever you are.”

And it is indeed a great tool, and perfect for GTD. It was simple to set up my projects, brain dump into my inbox and ensure I had my contexts set and an d working well. It kept me busy on a long flight, tweaking until everything seemed just so. And then I realised why it would never work for me.

Whilst my computing preferences are very much Apple, the organisation I work for is PC through and through. My entire GTD process in the office revolves around Outlook, and specifically the Task functionality. Tasks used to sync well with My Blackberry, and although the usability of the device wasn’t the best, they were at least ubiquitous. Alas, now I have a great device, awesome usability but no synchronisation of my tasks.

I am sure this is not insurmountable, and I would be grateful if anyone could share their solutions with me. In the mean time it’s back to the hipster PDA, reliable and always available, if not a little boring.