I’m a great fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodologies, and his practises to keep organised are helping me every day. His teachings don’t necessarily require any digital gadgets or expensive components to help you make your life more organised, but as for myself I prefer to keep my GTD lists on devices that I surely always have with me. With this in mind I’m always looking for good software which allows me to manage everything using my iPhone. I’m less at risk to forget this when I leave the house in the morning than pen and paper.

I tried using the Reminder functionality of iOS, but I found it not giving me enough possibilities to group my tasks. I tried OmniFocus and used it for more than a year, but I found that it is giving me too many options for structuring my tasks. It left me more or less paralised as I was constantly unsatisfied thinking there might be a better way of managing everything, so I probably spent more time wrestling around with OmniFocus than actually using it.

Thanks to an article of Donald Jenkins, it now seems I’ve found the application which resides exactly between Reminders and OmniFocus: Things. It is by far not as flexible as OmniFocus (which actually sticks the best to the GTD mantra of David Allen), but it gives a more clear rule-set which the user can stick to and don’t have to worry about managing the managing application. And thanks to the recently started open beta it syncs across iPhone, iPad and Mac easily.

Having an application which can be trusted and which takes the complexity out of managing tasks is key to the success of managing life more easily and efficient. Simplicity is (almost) always the best answer to complex problems.