If only life were this easy. Kinkless' Ethan Schoonover gives us this video preview of OmniFocus, which looks to be a pretty nice little app.

The thing that gets me, though, is that OmniFocus does not seem to provide any way to prioritize tasks. To be fair, there is a simple project setting where you can designate that all tasks must be done sequentially, but that's not the same thing as true prioritizing.

I assume this is because the Getting Things Done system does not provide for prioritization. I don't know. I've not read the book and don't plan to. I've got a system. I just don't have the software (no thanks to Windows-centric Franklin-Covey).

The idea behind prioritization is that not all tasks are alike, and to-do lists can become run-on laundry lists of everything to be done under the sun without some prioritization.

My system is fairly straightforward:

A - must be done today
B - should be done today, if possible
C - would be nice if done today (but it's not essential)

This way, even though I may have literally dozens of important things on my list, I can focus straightaway on the most important things first, and then move on to the next most important things -- without having to stop and evaluate just how important each thing is, over and over, throughout the day. I don't know about you, but sometimes my days can get to be pretty darned hectic, and it's great to have figured out in advance what are the big rocks to put in the jar first before dropping in the pebbles and sand.

From what I can discern, OmniFocus (and Kinkless' kGTD + OmniOutliner) don't provide for any native prioritization of tasks. (It's especially ironic when syncing with iCal's own task list, which does in fact offer prioritization. It's not exactly an obscure feature, is it?) Now of course I could subvert the context feature of the system and use that to establish prioritization instead of work context, but that's not ideal, either.

I'd like to have both! I'd like to look at my tasks by priority, broken down by context ... and then flip over to tasks by context, broken down by priority. Alas this doesn't seem to be in the offing, at least in the first release. With dozens of things to get done, having a big long laundry list of unprioritized tasks could end up being more depressing than empowering.

I'm still likely to get OmniFocus when it's released, but I'm not sure how I'll use it. I hope against hope. OmniGroup has won much loyalty and admiration from me for their league-of-its-own OmniGraffle. If they can get task prioritization settings into OmniFocus, they'll have the killer app not just to get things done, but to get the right things done (including laundry).