Romancing The Hit List
Why is it so hard for me to stick to one time management tool? In the past five years, I’ve used everything from cloud-based tools like Remember The Milk to the simple To-Do support in iCal. I’ve settled on Cultured Code’s Things for the last eight months and have been a happy user, even through its darker beta days.But when cool apps like Potion Factory’s The Hit List come along, suddenly my old apps look tired and clunky.
The Hit List (yes, the name includes the “The”) not only looks fantastic, but it gives me two of the features that I cannot find together in either my previous love, OmniFocus, or my current GTD partner, Things.
The first is support for outlining and hierarchical tasks. OmniFocus excels here, clearly inspired by Omni’s excellent OmniOutliner product. Not only can I get a complete snapshot of all of my upcoming activities in a given project, but it’s also a far superior way for me to enter new tasks. Top-level tasks with sub-tasks and sub-sub-tasks are wonderful things. My brain just works this way, which is what ultimately drew me to OmniFocus in the first place. But where OmniFocus is complex and mechanical, The Hit List is light and simple in a way that I find even superior to Things. Which is saying quite a lot, since I think Things is one of the most elegant applications on the Mac today.
While Things lacks the hierarchical tasks of OmniFocus, it won me over to a great extent due to its rich support for tags. The Hit List, though, one-ups Things with support for Smart Folders based on tags (or anything else, for that matter) and its brilliant tabbed user interface. While Things lets me create a detailed set of tags, navigating between them is a bear. The Hit List makes this effortless, and I find myself scanning through my tasks much more frequently as a result. And given that a review process is critical to any form of time management, this is a big win in my books.
So, have I switched over? No, not yet at least. There are a few bugs I’m still struggling with, especially regarding entry of tags. And the lack of an iPhone client, though in the works, is still a show-stopper for me.
But I’m keeping a close eye on The Hit List. With attention to detail in its design (see this fantastic post on designing the UI for repeating tasks) and a slowly-improving feature list, I may, for the zillionth time in my life, change my task management software yet again.
