I’ve been using OmniFocus for many months; well since the beta started. It’s a great GTD app and has a ton of nice features.

This week Anxiety, a new todo list app from Tom Stoelwinder at Model Concept was released. It’s free, so simple, and it begs for my use.

Using Anxiety as a HUD for OmniFocus

I’ve got a lot of contexts and projects logged in OmniFocus and can’t see migrating away from it. It works so why fix it. Last night I was playing with Anxiety to see how nice it syncs with iCal and immediately noticed that since it will sync my calendars and let me create new calendars directly from it’s interface, it’s got to work nicely with OmniFocus. And it did; beautifully and bidirectionally.

This is great for me because I can’t stand desktop clutter and OmniFocus is a full featured app. It takes up a lot of real estate on my desktop. If I’m in the middle of something and want to check off a action that’s been completed, I’d rather be able to do it quickly instead of jumping into OmniFocus. This is where Anxiety really shines now. Since Anxiety has a nice toggle on the menu bar, I can show it quickly, mark it as completed and go back to work. Or, since it’s so small, I can leave it floating on my mostly uncluttered desktop.

OmniFocus Sync Preferences

In your preferences pane for OmniFocus, setup which contexts you want to sync with iCal calendars. Keep in mind any calendars in iCal that you already have and take advantage of them if you can. If you want them to be deleted in OmniFocus when they are deleted from iCal, check that option in the preferences. I didn’t because I want them to show as completed for my daily review. Now when I check something off in Anxiety, the next time I snyc OmniFocus it get’s marked as completed. Another added bonus is that anything new created in Anxiety will end up in you OmniFocus inbox. Schweet!

A big thanks goes out to Tom for a kick-ass little app!

Note: Reader Aaron points out that Anxiety is Leopard only and he is correct. It relies on Leopards new system-wide database.