Trying Things 3 for Two Weeks
I’ve been an on-and-off user of OmniFocus for the last half a decade or so. I got pretty excited at the release of OmniFocus 3’s iOS beta earlier this year. Omnigroup always does a great job with their software. However this time around, even after release, there are areas of OmniFocus 3 I felt needed some work.
I’m learning to experiment with my systems, so one night, I decided to embark upon an adventure — try Things 3 for two weeks.
Every task manager is different. If you’ve ever tried out two or three different apps, it’s easy to see each one has a unique focus, strengths, and weaknesses.
My goal in testing Things 3 was to find if it could really work for me, or if OmniFocus would still reign supreme.
How I Tested
There’s really only one way to truly test a task manager — go all in.
It’s true. The only way you’re ever going to figure out if productivity software will work for you is to throw everything you can in it to see where it breaks.
To get going, I downloaded the Mac trial and the iPhone app, set up a sync account, and started moving tasks over.
Importing items into Things 3 isn’t actually all that difficult. I set up some Areas, and I started copy/pasting tasks in from OmniFocus, setting tags, due dates, and the like as I went.
To be fair, I didn’t dive into automation, the iPad app, or much for keyboard shortcuts in my two weeks. These are strong features of the Things suite, but I’m not a heavy user of any of these anyway.
You might be asking, “Why only two weeks? It takes longer than two weeks to get used to something like a task manager.”
True, and fair point. I had two reasons:
- The Mac app trial and iOS App Store return period are two weeks
- Two weeks is a fair bit of time for the “new shiny” feeling of something to wear off and to get to the real meat of something.
With that being said, here’s what I found in my short venture into Things 3.
Things I Liked
Aesthetics. Things 3 has had its praises sung up and down for its world-class design. It’s true — this software is one of the best looking task managers out there. OmniFocus 3’s redesign is great, too, but it’s not quite as aesthetically pleasing as Things 3. What stands out about Things’ design is user experience did not take a back seat to visual design.
Whimsy. It’s rare to get a whimsical feeling from using an app these days. While Things takes notes from general design trends, it’s whimsical experience is what makes the app a truly enjoyable software to use. Its whimsy comes mostly from the little details — transitions, animations and how the app responds to user interactions. It’s hard to explain in words, but if you’ve used the app, you’ve likely noticed this.
Less-Pushy Due Dates. Nobody wants to wake up to 25 overdue tasks. Nobody. And let’s be honest — this is largely a process problem for most people by overusing due dates. However, if you do end up missing a task on its deadline date, wouldn’t it be nice if it just rolled to the next day instead of ending up in some different “overdue” screen? Things 3 does this, and it remove much of stress from missed tasks.
Rock Solid Sync. Sync is a core feature of any app these days. All I have to say about Things 3’s cloud sync is it just works. As a former Things 2 user, I am grateful to see this in action.
Floating Add Button. This is one of those whimsical design elements, but it deserves its own mention. The floating add button, which can be tapped to add a task in context or dragged to another part of the screen to add a task in place, is a genius addition. I never knew I wanted one until Things implemented it!
Rapid Development. It’s a bummer to see so many great apps (Editorial and Dispatch, for example) have ridiculously long release cycles, especially when OSes and other software are changing at a rapid pace. Cultured Code definitely keeps up with the changes, but also goes above and beyond with major feature releases every few months. I have to give total credit to the developer for this.
Things I Didn’t
No More Than One Level of Subtasks. I didn’t think this was going to be a big deal for me, but it turned out to be. In Things, you can have these items hierarchically:
- Area
- Project
- Task
- Checklist
Unless I was missing something, you can’t get any deeper than this.
As a person who sometimes has multi-step, nested processes templated out, this became a little overwhelming to deal with. In big projects, I rely heavily on the hierarchy folding features in OmniFocus. Not to have these was quite a challenge to overcome.
Not as Easy to Hide Tasks. In addition to having only a single level of subtasks, I found it harder to hide tasks. Start dates were helpful, but sometimes they also hid tasks too well for my liking. What I need out of a task manager is the ability to hide tasks until I need them, and then make it easy to see them when it’s time to start checking them off. For the way I think about tasks, Things 3 only got part of the way there.
No Perspectives or Saved Searches. This has been a frustration of many who are coming from other task managers who have a saved search type feature. I’m not the biggest perspectives user in OmniFocus, but even the ability to show tasks fitting multiple criteria without having to retype a search query would be a great addition to Things.
What Did I Choose?
I went back to OmniFocus 3.
Indeed, it’s never easy to change a big piece of your workflow, and OmniFocus has largely been the rock-solid center for a number of years.
Don’t get me wrong — Things 3 is a fantastic task manager. I’m partial to the design choices made by Cultured Code throughout the app. It’s just fun to use.
However, you have to stick with what works for you. Some of the things I didn’t like simply kept me from working as efficiently as I could in Things versus OmniFocus.
Despite not making a change from this experiment, I did learn a number of lessons from Things’ opinions toward task management I’m taking and now applying to my OmniFocus workflow.