Excellent Task Manager that is Simple to Use

I have been using Things for several years now and I love this simple, beautifully designed app that focuses on doing one thing and doing it really well. There is no feature bloat here and yet that does not mean the app does not provide you with the means to organize the many things you want to remember, get done or file away for maybe/someday. It can also be helpful for managing simple projects. I use this together with the calendar app included in OS X and between the two of them I am highly organized and on top of things I want to remember to take care of each day. You may be familiar with the book, “Getting Things Done” and Things is laid out to facilitate the flow of task management that book teaches. You can add items into your inbox on the fly and deal with assigning those later to various dates you want to get them done. I usually review the inbox and other sections each day in the morning to plan not only today and make adjustments, additions or deletions as need be but also to review the week ahead, etc. Thoughout the day if some new task I need to get done comes up, I either add it directly to the day I know I want to take care of it or if I am not sure then, I just toss it in the inbox and deal with it later when I do my weekly review if not sooner.

The beauty of Things for me along with its basic structure is how easy it is to manage the tasks once they are in there. It is a breeze to move things around and each night anything I didn’t get to is automatically rolled over to the following day for me. If I wind up with too much stuff going on, something changes or whatever it is a very simple affair to rearrange my tasks and priorities as i see fit. Things never gets in my way with a lot of stuff that would just be distractions. The whole point of an app that excels for task management is for the focus to be on rapidly planning what you are going to do and then getting on with the business of actually doing it. I have seen way too many of these kind of applictions going back many years that try to do so much stuff all in one app that the learning curve is ridiculous and you spend more time messing around with app and planning stuff endlessly than you do getting stuff done. You are going to be far more productive with an app like this where the focus is on your tasks, not the app you are managing them in.

One of my favorite features in Things is being able to click on any task item and then drag that item over to the Scheduled focus area in the left pane of the window which then immediately pops up a nice little calendar for me to select what date I want that item to show up on. It’s just that easy to reassign something to some other day.

If you are looking for something that is easy to learn and easy to use so you can actually get more done than planning to get stuff done I would highly recommend Things to you.

Lastly, I will just add that I have found the app to be highly reliable and stable with zero issues in several years of use now on a daily basis. It just works. I love it when stuff just works. Things just works. Five stars.

Linmukai about Things