Written by Shahzaib Ali
Things 3 App Review
I have a note in Things 3 that says “write Things 3 review.” It’s been sitting in my Someday list for about four months, which is either ironic or a perfect demonstration of how the app’s Someday feature works — tasks that matter but don’t have a deadline quietly wait there without creating anxiety.
That low-anxiety quality is actually the best entry point for understanding what Things 3 is and why it has the kind of devoted following that most productivity apps can only dream about. I’ve been using it as my primary task manager for just over two years now, across a MacBook Pro, iPhone 15, and iPad. I’ve recommended it to probably a dozen people. I’ve also watched some of those people try it and go back to something else.
This review is going to be genuinely honest about both sides of that — what makes Things 3 exceptional, what makes it genuinely frustrating, and who it’s actually built for.
What Things 3 Is (And What It Isn’t)
Things 3 is a task management app for Apple devices, made by a small German company called Cultured Code. It’s been around in various versions since 2007, and version 3 launched in 2017 to widespread enthusiasm from the Mac productivity community.
It is not a project management platform. It is not a note-taking app. It does not have AI features that write your tasks for you, a built-in calendar that replaces your regular calendar, or a collaboration system for sharing tasks with teammates. If you’re coming from Asana, Monday.com, or Notion expecting something in that category, Things 3 will feel conspicuously minimal.
What it is, is a beautifully designed, thoughtfully structured personal task manager built on Getting Things Done principles. It’s for managing your own work — capturing everything you need to do, organising it by area and project, and seeing the right tasks at the right time without drowning in a list of everything at once.
That focus is both its biggest strength and the source of most complaints about it.
The Design, Which Is Not a Superficial Thing
I want to talk about design first because with Things 3 it’s not superficial. The way the app looks directly affects how you feel about opening it, and that feeling affects whether you actually use it.
Things 3 is, without competition, the most beautiful task management app available on any platform. I don’t mean it has nice icons. I mean the typography is considered, the spacing feels intentional, the way tasks animate when you complete them has a satisfying quality that other apps have tried to copy without quite getting right. When you check off a completed task, it briefly glows and disappears. That tiny detail sounds frivolous. After two years, it still makes checking things off feel like something.
The design philosophy extends to information density. Things 3 shows you what you need to see and doesn’t show you what you don’t. Your Today view shows today’s tasks. Your Upcoming view shows the next several days. Your Someday list is there when you want it and invisible when you don’t. There’s no dashboard covered in widgets, no analytics panel, no inbox count badge designed to create anxiety.
First-time users sometimes interpret this as the app being limited. It’s not limited — it’s edited. There’s a meaningful difference, and recognizing it is what separates people who click with Things 3 from people who don’t.
The Structure: Areas, Projects, and Tasks
The organisational system in Things 3 is worth understanding properly before you start using it, because setting it up wrong causes most of the frustration new users experience.
Tasks are individual to-dos. Simple.
Projects are containers for tasks that have a defined endpoint — a specific outcome you’re working toward. “Launch website redesign,” “Plan annual offsite,” “Write Q3 report.” Projects have tasks inside them, optional notes, an optional deadline, and a status (active, on hold, or complete).
Areas are ongoing life categories that never complete — they just contain projects and tasks that belong to that part of your life. Work, Personal, Health, Side Projects, Home. Areas don’t have deadlines or completion states. They’re permanent buckets.
Headings go inside Projects to organise tasks into sections within a project. If you’re planning an event, you might have headings for Venue, Catering, Guest List, and Communications — each with tasks underneath.
The hierarchy is: Area → Project → Heading → Task. Once that clicks, organising everything makes immediate sense.
The mistake most people make when they start: they create too many Projects for things that are actually just single tasks, or they create too few Areas and dump everything into a flat list. Spend your first week just capturing everything without worrying too much about structure, then spend one Sunday afternoon organising what you’ve captured. By that point you’ll have a clear sense of what groups naturally belong together.
The Today View: The Feature That Runs My Day
If I had to identify the single feature responsible for why I’ve stuck with Things 3 for two years, it’s the Today view and the specific way it works.
Every morning, I open Things 3 to the Today view. I see only what’s scheduled for today plus whatever I’ve manually moved into today. Nothing else clutters it. Then I spend about five minutes in the Upcoming view — which shows the next week of scheduled tasks — and drag anything that feels right for today into the Today section.
This ritual replaced an anxious email-checking habit I’d had first thing every morning. Instead of starting the day with whatever someone else decided was urgent, I start it with a deliberate five-minute review of what I’m actually trying to accomplish.
The Magic Plus button — the button you use to add tasks — is context-aware in a way that sounds trivial but matters constantly. If you’re in a Project when you tap the plus, the new task goes in that project. If you’re in Today, the new task goes to Today. If you’re in Someday, the new task goes to Someday. You’re never fighting the app to put something where you want it.
Natural Language Input Done Right
Things 3 has natural language parsing for task creation that’s been refined over years of updates and works better than it has any right to.
Type “Call accountant tomorrow at 2pm” and it creates a task called “Call accountant” scheduled for tomorrow with a 2pm reminder. Type “finish report next Friday” and it creates the task with next Friday’s date. Type “buy birthday gift for mom in three weeks” and it schedules three weeks out.
This works probably 85% of the time without any manual correction. The other 15% — usually more complex or unusual date phrasing — you set manually with a clean date picker that’s fast to use.
For quick capture on iPhone especially, this makes adding tasks as fast as typing a text message. I add tasks without breaking stride because the friction is genuinely low.
The Things That Drive Me Crazy
I’m going to spend real time here because the frustrations are legitimate and anyone considering Things 3 should know about them.
No collaboration, full stop. Things 3 is a solo app. You cannot share a project with a colleague, assign tasks to someone else, or see someone else’s tasks. For personal use this is fine. The moment you need even basic team task sharing — a grocery list with a partner, project tasks with a coworker — you’re reaching for a different app. This is a deliberate product decision, not an oversight, and Cultured Code has been clear they’re not adding collaboration. Know this going in.
No natural deadline reminders. You can set a deadline on a task, but Things 3 doesn’t proactively alert you that a deadline is approaching. You get a badge on the app icon and a visual indicator in the app, but no push notification saying “this is due tomorrow.” Coming from apps that aggressively remind you about deadlines, this silence feels wrong for the first few weeks. You adapt — checking Upcoming becomes habitual — but it’s a genuine adjustment.
Sync is proprietary and solid, but iCloud it is not. Things 3 uses its own cloud sync infrastructure (Things Cloud) rather than iCloud. Sync is fast and I’ve had zero issues in two years, but it means you’re dependent on Cultured Code’s servers. This has never been a problem in practice, but it’s worth knowing.
Pricing is per-platform and not cheap. Things 3 costs $49.99 for Mac, $9.99 for iPhone, and $19.99 for iPad. If you want it on all three Apple devices — which most users do — you’re spending $79.97. There’s no subscription, which is genuinely appreciated, but the upfront cost is a significant commitment compared to free alternatives. There’s a free trial for Mac; I strongly recommend using it for the full trial period before buying.
No Android, no Windows, no web app. If any device you regularly use runs outside Apple’s ecosystem, Things 3 isn’t for you. This is not a gap they’re planning to fill.
A Week of Real Tasks: What It Actually Looks Like
Here’s a realistic picture of how I used Things 3 last week:
Monday morning: Opened Today view, moved three tasks from Upcoming, added two quick tasks from my morning email review using natural language. Done in six minutes.
Tuesday: Added a new Project (“Prepare for quarterly review”) with four tasks under it. Used headings to separate “Research” tasks from “Writing” tasks. Moved the most urgent task directly to this week.
Wednesday: Completed six tasks. Each check-off was satisfying enough that I actually remember it, which sounds silly but is psychologically relevant.
Thursday: Used the Quick Entry shortcut (Command + Space when the main shortcut is set up) to add three tasks without interrupting what I was working on in another app.
Friday: Moved four tasks to Someday that weren’t going to happen this week, without guilt, because Someday is specifically for that and Things 3 makes it painless.
That’s a real week. It’s not dramatic. That’s kind of the point — a good task manager should disappear into the background of how you work, not demand attention itself.
The Widgets, Apple Watch, and Cross-Device Experience
Things 3’s iOS widgets are genuinely good — you can put your Today list on your home screen and check off tasks directly from the widget without opening the app. For quick morning reviews this is more convenient than I expected it to be.
The Apple Watch app shows your today tasks and lets you complete them with a tap. I don’t use this heavily, but for checking what’s next during a busy day when pulling out my phone feels disruptive, it’s useful.
Mac-to-iPhone sync is fast enough that I’ve never experienced a meaningful delay. Add a task on my phone, open my Mac a minute later, it’s already there. Cultured Code’s sync infrastructure is one of the quietly excellent things about the product.
Who Things 3 Is Right For
After two years, here’s my honest read on the ideal Things 3 user:
You work primarily or entirely within Apple’s ecosystem. You work mostly independently — your tasks are your own, not shared with a team. You value design and the quality of your tools enough that it affects how willingly you use them. You prefer a clear, focused system over a feature-packed one. And you’re willing to pay a one-time price for software that will work exactly the same way in five years.
If that’s you, Things 3 is the best personal task manager available. Not one of the best — the best.
If you need collaboration, cross-platform access, subscription pricing, AI-assisted task creation, or any meaningful integration with non-Apple services, Something else will serve you better — TickTick, Todoist, or OmniFocus depending on your specific needs.
That task I had in my Someday list — “write Things 3 review” — I moved it to Today two days ago. It’s getting checked off after I finish this sentence.
That little glow animation is going to feel good.
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