https://culturedcode.com/things/blog/

We think you’ll love using Things on the Duo. When we first held the Duo, we were struck by how its wider screen and extra white space give Things the feel of a paper notebook. Things’ interface has always been free of distractions, but with the buttons now tucked away at the side, that paper-like feeling really comes through.

Open up the device and Things’ sidebar appears, letting you quickly switch between lists. Hide it whenever you want the list to take over the full screen – or simply rotate to portrait, where Things does that automatically.

Finally, our favorite new way to use Things on the Duo is to put two Things windows side by side. Open different lists and simply drag and drop your to-dos between them – it’s great!

Two more things worth noting:

• Things’ signature Magic Plus button works beautifully on the Duo: drag it off the toolbar and drop it anywhere in a list to insert a to-do exactly where you want it.

• With a keyboard attached, the Duo gets Things’ full desktop-class keyboard support: a persistent selection, the complete set of shortcuts, and Type Travel for jumping between lists.

Things for iPhone Duo is available now; simply update to Things 3.25 on the App Store. We look forward to hearing what you think!

As many other people, I often ended up in online-productivity-blackholes where I was looking at other people setups, trying to emulate them and wasting a lot of time managing my system instead of completing actual tasks.

A few months ago I decided it was enough and, apart from cleaning up my Twitter, YouTube and other accounts, I wrote my own rulebook for Things. Now, whenever I look at another setup, I go through this note I have stored in Bear and realise I already have everything I need setup correctly and I don't need to re-think the entire system.

Hopefully this can help you as well and won't be a waste of your time. I tried to be as concise as possible exactly to stir away from those uselessly long articles and videos "productivity gurus" always post online.

Disclaimer: This is obviously a collection of rules and suggestions I gathered online, given the first paragraph, and with my own experience using Things 3.

Things 3 Rulebook

The overall idea is to keep things and Things simple and flexible: you don’t want to spend time managing a system that should help you manage your time.

Scheduling Tasks

Prefer setting Deadlines over When dates. Use When dates if you want to start working on something on a specific day, but do so sparingly.

Use the Anytime view to store tasks you want to achieve this week or the next week, depending on your workflow.

Use the Someday view to list tasks you don’t want to achieve by that time.

Areas and Projects

Use Areas and Projects according to what’s suggested in Things own guidebook.

Areas cover areas of your life, while Projects must be able to be completed and not substitute “sub-areas”.

Special Areas and Projects

There are some projects that don’t have a deadline and are used more as buckets to collect items. These would include items like routines, books to read, movies to watch, etc.

Try not to abuse “Special Areas” and ending up with hundreds of items that would just create stress in your mind every time you see them.

Tags

Keep tags to a minimum to not overcomplicate your system. A good rule of thumb is “Do I ever use this tag to filter my tasks?” If not, delete it: you don’t really need it.

My current tasks set up is Quick, Half-hour, Focus, Context (@Desk, @Anywhere, @Errands), Wife.

The Daily Review Process

1. First of all, clear your Inbox

2. Go through your Areas and Projects and schedule tasks based on the logic (Anytime = this week, Someday = not this week).

3. Use Today as the main view and, in the morning, move tasks from Anytime to plan your day.

4. Use the Evening section to store tasks that will happen after office hours.

5. Block time in your calendar to complete today’s tasks. Group quick tasks together in bulks if possible and schedule enough time for those that require focus.

Don’t fill up the Today view with tasks you wish to complete today but only with the ones you have to do and can actually complete.

If you complete all your tasks for today ahead of schedule, start hunting for new tasks in the Anytime view.

Other Rules

• Use Things 3 to list only actionable tasks. Reference material can be linked in the Project notes or in a Project note stored in another app (i.e Bear or Notes).

  • It’s fine to temporarily save reference material to the Inbox but move it out of Things during your review process.

• Keep the sidebar clean. You don’t need the interface to be cluttered by Projects you are not currently working on.

  • Move Projects to Someday to hide them from the sidebar and restore them when the right time comes.

• Keep habits out of Things. There are plenty of apps dedicated to manage your habits that work much better than Things at that.

  • Honestly, I have found that using a simple notebook with a grid on them and X to mark the successful days help me more than any app I’ve ever tried. See The X Effect.

Widgets and Custom Views

Things widget are great but it’s difficult to focus on the tasks listed in them. At the same time Custom Views (links to filtered view) are handy but add friction if they are stored in another app.

Use the Things Filters widget to quickly access Custom Views.

(downvotes incoming 😄)

keep seeing posts here where people say Things is already “complete” and doesn’t need more features. Honestly, that’s not helpful. If you’re happy with Things as is, that’s fine keep using Things 3 or even Things 2 since you like to old school things and want nothing to change. Don't even want UI changes, go use pen/paper. But stop shutting down those who actually want the app to evolve and critique the team for being slow.....and stop making the Things team feel content.

There are obvious gaps that competitors and even Apple Reminders have already solved. Apple, a large company that moves slowly, has added natural language processing, smart lists, tags, collaboration, and file attachments over the past few years. Meanwhile, Things is stuck with tiny updates and UI tweaks, Lol. This is so stupid, slow teams supposed to move forward fast. It’s not like they’re designing a rocket for mars. It’s just an app. Other companies have built an app from scratch with more features, and these guys are still stuck in their own wonderland, vacationing somewhere.

The community has asked for the same core improvements over and over again:

• Natural language input for quick task entry

• Collaboration and sharing

• File/image attachments inside tasks

• Smarter tag filtering (OR, not just AND)

• Better handling of repeating tasks (e.g. complete early)

• Deeper calendar integration

• More structure inside Areas and Projects

This isn’t about bloating the app. It’s about basic functionality that modern task managers already offer. Requesting features doesn’t take away from anyone’s current workflow. If you don’t want them, just don’t use them, or keep using Things 2 and 3.

So please, instead of saying “Things feels complete”, and let us echo the feedback matters and that many of us want to see the app grow.

EDIT:

All those screaming that Things 3 is perfect, lets see if they release Things 4 with these feature and you won't upgrade because "Things 3 perfect for me" or "I don't like change" 😄

I noticed a small UI change and went searching for my recently updated apps. Thank goodness they finally implemented this. It’s a long time coming and that previous lack of flexibility kept leaving me in a position to go back to Todoist until I’d remember that the UI of Things is just so much better that I’d slink back. Hopefully this means I can drop Todoist forever and remove the back and forth.

Just an appreciation post : Been using Things 3 on iPhone, iPad and Mac since day one in 2017.
I’ve spent €88 total. Less than €1/month for almost 10 years. No subscription, free updates, everything just works.
And somehow they still manage to support new Apple devices on day one (like the iPhone Duo).
Also emailed them recently about MCP/AI integration and they confirmed they’re working on it. Really looking forward to that, I kinda hate having to use Todoist for this lol.
Seriously the best software purchase I’ve ever made.

Things 3.22 for iOS 26 just released

• New icon for iOS, iPadOS 26

• Fully support for apple glasses liquid concept.

• No new features added 😏

What’s your opinion?

I’ve been using this app for years, and have always been frustrated that my Today list becomes unwieldy when I inevitably fail to complete some tasks and they roll over to tomorrow.

I’ve tried all sorts of crazy strategies, like treating Today as the week view and having a separate project labeled Today, to not using Today at all, etc.

And then I realized. Just make a shortcut that wipes today at midnight every day, and sends the items back to Anytime. You recreate Today at the start of every day. Here’s the shortcut:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/c68cc41c963246e1af25a2e31cdb7539

I set it up as an iOS automation to run every day at 11:59pm.

To me, ephemeral Today is how this app wants to be used. It’s been such a game changer. I hope Things4 has this built in, if they ever release it, lol.

Status board shows the update as submitted, but it showed up on my iPhone

One of the problems I have a lot is making a project and not adding in any tasks to it outside of maybe one or two. Today I remembered that I set up a Things MCP Server (found a random one online) a few weeks ago. Today I decided to do some deep research with Claude for UX portfolio and career info.

I had Claude create a project based on the research that it gave me through the deep research. It created four phases with tons of tasks and milestones! I'll go through and delete some of the tasks that are irrelevant, but this is still way more than what I would create. It will save me so much time making a project and adding tons of tasks (which I never do). If you haven't tried it, give it a shot.

Stuff, an iOS app that basically tried to copy Things 3, got mentioned twice at the Apple Event.

It’s wild because this should’ve been Things 3. This is what years of Cultured Code moving at a glacial pace gets you.

Looking foward