No, we don’t want that.
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More than anything else I want Things 4 to have more options for adapting it to my workflow instead of needing to adapt to it.
Things like nested areas (or at least headings) would be extremely helpful for me to reduce distractions when my ADHD brain wants to do anything except what I should be doing.
For the same reason I depend on deep linking to navigate to and from tasks to related files, notes, etc. but having ugly Markdown URLs makes things so much more cluttered and does away with Things’ minimal aesthetic that’s so perfect for me. Bear, Ulysses, tons of Apple apps have implemented better link handling in markdown even without doing live rendering.
That said, Cultured Code has indicated they’re not interested in either of those features so I’m not very hopeful.
I’d also love a sync/web API so that I could see tasks integrated into Fantastical the way Todoist does, I’d also be interested in trying it out with something like Akiflow unless Things 4 has a planner built right in.
It would also be really nice if we could have a tags sidebar rather than a floating window, it just makes window management that much more difficult.
I’ve moved away from Things for managing projects but a Kanban view might still be nice. I’m not sure this added complexity would actually benefit Things though, I’d love to see their take on it.
As far as predictions go, other than Kanban view — which I highly doubt will be implemented — I think there’s a small chance any of these could happen but I certainly don’t expect them. I also suspect we’re going to be waiting a while more yet.
What I wouldn’t give for OmniFocus power and flexibility with Things’ design language.
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This may seem like hyperbole, it’s not intended to be, but I think Apple Reminders is getting close. There are obviously missing features, but I think it is closer to this ideal than Things currently is.
Who woulda thunk it? 
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Hmm, maybe it’s time I revisit that for anything more serious than grocery lists. I’ll give it a go, I’ve been meaning to test out GoodTask anyway too.
For what it is worth, I’m posted several threads about how I use Reminders for complex, interdepartmental projects. It is doable and better than most think. At this point, I consider Reminders as sitting somewhere between Things and OF in terms of feature set and GUI. With the recent updates, Reminders has Smart Lists, Tags, Sections, “a Kanban Board” type feature, and more. I’m happy to help if desired.
Here is one example of what can be done in Reminders:
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Bmosbacker posted an interesting YouTube video a while back, arguing that you should probably not use a task-manager like Things to manage projects. Of course, you can have tasks like « work on this project », maybe with a couple of GTD next actions to move things along, but you should probably manage your projects elsewhere: Obsidian, for example.
That said, I think I understand where you’re coming from. If I can’t have an overview of all my projects, I get anxious. And when I can see them all, I get overwhelmed.
I don’t know how you do it. I use Reminders plenty, but I don’t like it. The damn thing is so annoying.
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I may be a glutton for punishment. 
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Man, this plagued me for years. I finally got comfortable putting projects on a Hold status, even if only for a week or a month. Easy to do in Omnifocus, but I think a pausing section in any project organizer is easy to set up.
Didn’t fully solve the “anxious or overwhelm” problem, but helped me become a bit more practical about it all.
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I am happy with things 3 as task. manager, what I would love to see is incorporating a calendar in the app.
Yep, I’ve come across that concept a number of times before and it has influenced how I manage larger projects outside of my task manager.
That said, I always find it interesting that no one who says not to use task managers for projects then actually breaks down the workflow. Do you move tasks back and forth between project management and task management? If not how do you manage overwhelm or make sure nothing falls through the cracks because you now have multiple places to work from instead of that single source of truth? What about redundancy? It’s nice for gurus to say not to use task managers for projects at a strategic level but I’d love see how that looks tactically.
I’ve developed a workflow of sorts but I have a feeling it could be better.
This may be a conversation for a separate thread, it’s just been a point of confusion for me.
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At work we use Jira for project management. I then use Things to manage my own personal tasks related to the different projects in Jira. For each project I’m working on, I have a project in Things where I include a link to the Jira item. We have a daily standup where we review all the Jira items that people are working on and this generally will generate some tasks in Things which go into the appropriate project that links back to Jira.
So Jira is used to manage the often months long projects and Things has the tactical next steps that I have to do or follow up on with other people. I often have many Waiting For tasks in Things with a due date like “Waiting for Jane to finish research on API”. This makes sure dependencies I have to accomplish my part of the project don’t fall through the cracks.
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Just to say I agree with this. The way I’ve always viewed the enterprise task management and project software in my job is that it’s a tool for recording and reporting on my deliverables for the benefit of others, but how I actually go about doing this is all in my personal task management system which only I see.
It is an extra overhead to go and update teams but I actually find that helpful in a way as I treat it sort of like a GTD review.
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That is really helpful @jcarucci and @DeepBlue, thanks for the thoughtful discussion. I think that will be helpful as I further refine my system.
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After using Things full time for 3-4 years, I switched back to OmniFocus last week. Jumping through hoops to skip a repeating todo and getting it rescheduled was driving me insane. I like the program otherwise, but my reminders are sometimes fluid and I got sick of messing with it. OmniFocus is too powerful for my needs, but it was a breath of fresh air going back to the customization options it offers.
Another thing they really need to fix in my opinion is the need for a master list. I am gradually moving things to OF as they come due on Things. Except every time something comes up on Things I have to delete it twice. First the due today todo, and then the awaiting one in the folder. There are other ways to do it, but the whole thing feels cumbersome.
Full disclosure, I am not new. I asked Stephen almost a year ago to delete my account because of privacy issues with my username. I wanted to complain about Things (and say how much I love OF), so here I am. 
I am not going to post my old user name because it’s too close to my real name.
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Welcome back! 20 characters…
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Reminders is so close to absolutely awesome, however for me the overall design language is still lacking. Specifically not letting me hide image, url and note previews making my task list unusable.
Do love the Siri integration and other macOS and iOS integrations.
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I’ve gone off the deep end with this over the past few weeks. A good PM would tell you this doesn’t really matter, because a tool is just a tool, but the workflow is what you need. Which is all well and good, but I’ve tried a lot of PM tools in the past 7 days and they’re all different versions of broken or expensive.
The reason you don’t hear normal people talking about this is because it’s not really a “normal person” problem.
I’ve tried the following (not going to link to it all because I don’t have time):
- ClickUp: Has all the tools you need, but is basically a blank slate. Also very broken. Half the time what I add doesn’t save, or gets duplicated. You spend a lot of time creating views, but if you work with anybody else, you’ll need to write documentation on how to use your views. Anecdotally, the folks I’ve seen have success with ClickUp are moving from a different system and appreciate the blank slate of ClickUp. Their experience with past systems has informed how they use these tools generally, so they don’t need to consider every step of their process. They can just add everything in ClickUp and get to work. (I don’t know how they deal with the bugs, though.)
- Asana: This is great and I was all gun-ho to pay for it (it really felt like the perfect PM system for somebody who wants something like a task management system, but with more features). Almost everything I wanted to do felt natural and intuitive (with the exception being manually sorting my projects list, which is apparently beyond Asana in 2024). The catch is that all these great features are only available on the Business tier and up, which is there most expensive plan. At the free tier, Asana stinks. The Business tier requires 2 minimum seats, and it costs $500 USD/year at that tier. (For some reason, $250/year for an enterprise tool seemed reasonable to me, but I can’t pay for a whole seat I’m not using.)
- Jira: It’s terrible. Saved searched don’t update for no discernible reason. When I looked up how to update saved searches so I could plan sprints, the documentation said there was no way to manually update these searches, and I just had to wait. I don’t know why that’s the case, but I genuinely don’t know how real PMs use this product day in and day out.
- Trello: Jira, but with a different coat of paint and 1/100th of the feature set, making it useless at the task we’re actually talking about (documenting upcoming work and saving a record of its completion).
- Plutio: super duper unbelievably broken. When I signed up for an account, half the tasks they put in their demo project were missing their descriptions.
- Airtable: People fawn over this, but I’m not sure why — for the uses of tracking work, it felt like I was manually making a bunch of Excel sheets and macros. It looks affordable, but one could just use Excel (with all the advantages a native app entails).
- Notion: Not good at project management. They’ve tried to make some strides here, but it’s still way too clicky. The advantage is that you can make it whatever you want, but I find the UI so cumbersome and heavy that I don’t want to engage with it at all.
- monday.com: I didn’t try this because they require a minimum of 3 seats on their paid plan, which immediately ruled it out for me as a solopreneur. For all I know, this is perfect. (Years ago I had to use it with a client and I was unimpressed, but I’m not easily impressed.)
- Basecamp: I haven’t used this recently, but I did use it a lot for a while in the past. It’s good, but it’s overkill for one person, and it’s designed for team management and collaboration more so than tasks and lists. But it’s very good at the team collaboration thing, if that’s what you need, and priced affordably too if your team is scaling.
- Wrike: more expensive than Asana to get a similar feature set, and I personally find it harder to use.
I spent a bunch of time thinking about project management after watching the aforementioned video, and I think project management really has two aims:
- Team management in disguise.
- Planning a project, tracking it through its completion, and having a public-to-the-company record of how each task and milestone progressed.
Most companies do the first one well, but the second one is… hard to find. Almost all apps that want to be all-things-to-all-orgs are quite bad. Asana is very opinionated, but as a result, feels largely successful.
I also spoke with a few business owners and managers on this topic in the past week, and what they all told me is that each team they’ve ever managed has had their own bespoke flows. (This tells me the whole field is sort of a crackpot thing with no standards, but that’s neither here nor there.) So all these tools have to accommodate “bespoke” workflows, and thus their UIs are largely empty vessels for under-optimized messes.
I don’t know why tracking projects is reportedly such a hard thing to do for small teams. Video games nailed this forever ago (particularly open-world video games): they track all your open quests, tell you what you’ve done in each quest with a log, and show you the quests you’ve already completed below the open ones (with the log for your records).
Here’s an open quest in Skyrim. Here’s one from Baldur’s Gate 3. Even Zelda does a better job than most of these apps in their default states.
One thing you’ll note here is that video games are pretty consistent, not in look and feel, but as far as the sort of information users want to see (especially in a game, which is the sort of thing that a user might pick up and put down every couple months, so task recall is important). But project management tools are nowhere near this level of rigorous.
This is a shockingly bad ecosystem of apps, and it’s amazing that so many of these are accepted as the norm in their ecosystems. I think the reason nobody talks about how they manage the process for these is because the DIY attitude each business has about managing these tools means everybody is busy managing their process, but most teams still struggle to manage their projects. Unless you have a dedicated PM enforcing the rules, it’s all busywork.
If you, like me, have a real need for an app that can track context across multiple portfolios of client work with historical record keeping, and you’re just one person, I have no idea what to recommend at this point. I’m all ears if anybody has other suggestions.
Edit: sorry this is so long. I should just cut and paste it into a blog post.
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It seems to me that there’s a real opportunity here for some experienced game developers to get together and build project management software that incorporates these things. In addition to tracking and task recall, they also have experience in making the process of achieving goals, reaching levels, etc. enjoyable and even fun, and in the process motivating users to keep moving forward and achieve the next ones.
The notion of “gamification” has been thrown around a lot, but my sense (from my admittedly limited experience with apps that try to do that) is that much of the implementation outside gaming has tended to be rather shallow and cutesy.
But real gamers (I’m not one) seem to take gaming very seriously (while also thoroughly enjoying it) even though they not only don’t get paid to do it, they have to shell out thousands of dollars on expensive gaming rigs, video cards, and accessories, in addition to the cost of the games themselves.
It seems to me that software that gave project managers and teams even a little of that sense of excitement and motivation could really shake up the market for project management apps.
The main thing keeping that from happening is probably that really good game devs would rather keep creating games. But a few might find the challenge and the prospect of making a lot of money intriguing enough to give it shot.
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I think the main thing keeping it from happening is that the game industry is filled with burnt-out developers, the tools you make games with are very different from the tools you make apps with, and the money in making video games is way better.
I’d be very interested in a more gamified approach to project management, though. Todoist does a bit of that, but they’re in the task management category, and thus are not sufficient for the needs we’re discussing.