I was on vacation and missed the news that Omnifocus is 15 years old! That means I’ve been using it for fifteen years, or very nearly so. I forget which episode it was, but I know I was listening to an episode of Mac Break Weekly in downtown Philadelphia while waiting on a train back to my apartment. Merlin Mann was raving about it and I downloaded the app on the train terminal.

As I recall, I had Omnifocus on my primary home screen before I got to my station—it has never left. Now it sits in my dock where it has been for years. The app and method has gotten me through my MA, PhD, marriage and kids, moving cross-country (several times), through big projects and small ones. Whenever I have tried something else, it never sticks and I end up back in Omnifocus. I’m sure by now it might have at least as much to do with learned habits as anything else. I’m by no means a power user of the app, but that’s fine because I never needed to be for the value of keeping tabs on things to be apparent.

I wasn’t sure if I could check when I first installed the app so I checked if the App Store would have that purchase history. Yup, turns out I downloaded OmniFocus about two weeks after it launched.

List of Omnifocus editions in Apple App Store purchase history

(With this information, I tried to see which episode of Mac Break Weekly Merlinn was on, but even their archives only go back to 2013.

Happy anniversary, The Omni Group.