I’m having a hard time deciding between Things and The Hit List. Both offer a very pleasant GTD experience on the Mac.
Things 1.0 is available (as well as the companion iPhone/iPod touch app [link]) for $50US. The Hit List is in beta and the pre-release price is also $50. I love both, honestly.
Shawn Blanc has written high praise for Things. I agree with this assessment, but I’d hate to plunk down my fifty bucks only to kick myself in four weeks. What’s a geek to do?
Update: Here’s a nice interview with Jürgen Schweizer of Cultured Code.
today’s the last day of the 20% coupon over at Cultured Code/Things…so what did you decide? I’m lending toward THL ATM. thanks!
I’m not even giving The Hit List a chance. There are so many task-management apps out there, that I can’t imagine one of them is actually The One. I’ve hunkered down with Things and am very happy with it.
These GTD apps all do the job, it really all depends on what your brain wraps around best. The Hit List is *very* different than both OmniFocus and Things due to it being the least rigidly structured and essentially the only one that is completely keyboard driven, which seriously appeases developers and/or power-users who have embraced Quicksilver / LaunchBar. Frankly despite some growing pains of The Hit List being the new kid on the block among the more mature OmniFocus and Things products. I really like Things for it’s single window system, but I’ve never liked the iPhone app (compared to OmniFocus), and both OmniFocus and Things required way too much mouse moving, when I’m switching over from Launchbar in the midst of writing code. *Anything* that keeps my hands on the keyboard wins these days. Really abuse those trial periods if you are really on the fence about it.
In the end though, yes there will never be a perfect system unless you write it yourself, and you will spend so much time working on your system instead of using it. You’re gonna have to settle, and it’s a really subjective, personal decision – not a clear decision weighing pros and cons of feature presence.
The big issue I have with both Things and THL is that your next action lists can contain actions that aren’t actually doable, which defeats the whole purpose of having a GTD app.
What’s the point in looking at your @online context if a bunch of actions visible therein can’t actually be done yet because they are dependent on a prior task being completed first.
At least with Omnifocus, I know I’ll only see actions that are actually ready to be done.
I have been using Things for the last few months and have been having mixed feelings about the software.. though it is elegant, efficient and easy to use, some features like start date, due date and expected duration have been buggy. Also Things did not allow the user to specify a task and have sub tasks or actions..
The Hit List addresses all these problems quite efficiently.. the developers must have studied Things and have dutifully noted and included all the better features of Things..
If you love Things try the Hit List u ll love it!
The Hit List ROCKS ROCKS ROCKS!
The hit list is amazing!!! Keyboard shortcuts all over and explained incredibly simple and effectively, drag and drop notes in order, enter to add and to finish, tags put in automatically, sorting intelligently in folders – even when starting the program it moved the application to the applications folder as i agreed, and paying took around 20 seconds, including advicing my the security code was wrong and activating the program on th spot, making this the absolute easiest program i have ever used and bought – the family pack is 69$ so that was an easy choise too!!!
Thanks a lot for telling me about it!
The Things development people took an astonishing design decision right at the start which makes the app useless: you can’t, BY DESIGN, schedule tasks which have been organised into a project. You can’t make project sub tasks (like, say, the weekly project meeting), repeatable. While they have been producing Japanese versions and tweaking their pixels for months, this basic dysfunction festers away unaddressed. I tried for months to use it and ended up transferring my tasks into a moleskin everyday just to figure out what I was supposed to be doing! AVOID.