Much like this post I’m considering moving to the stock Reminders app. There’s stuff I want to do with my old completed to-dos and the search abilities and shortcuts scripting possibilities with Things 3 are quite limited. Highlighting an entire list and copying yields markdown of the task names, but none of the details within.
Reminders unsurprisingly has a lot of hooks.
Is there a way I can get data out of Things 3? Perhaps with some javascript magic? I’m not really looking forward to moving everything over from T → R.
Things URL schemes can’t output the data of existing items. It can create tasks, though.
Things uses a MySQL database to store its tasks. Because it’s an open format, then it can be addressed via some Database apps (and from there can be exported to CSV or another format) or even by command-line tools such as things.sh.
These can provide raw data that can be used by Shortcuts to create new Reminders.
I do not use the things app, however there might be a way to have shortcuts get the data out of the things app.
simple starter ideas…
For example if you can retrieve the data from one things record (hard to believe this would not be possible), then you could write a shortcuts loop that might extract all the data from things. And then you could save it as some kind of large text file or csv or json file etc.
Then you might be able to reverse the whole process and read the data from the CSV /json file into shortcuts and do another loop to add records to Reminders app.
Or maybe you could create a loop that does something like this:
Loop
get first record from things app (store in variables)
add one record to Reminders and paste the data
go to things app - next record etc.
Thanks @dealtek. Things actually does not allow access to the data even for one task. You can see it, but it won’t feed into a shortcut. The Show List or Show To-Do will open Things and show the list. Even the things URL schemes only show things.
Wow that is a surprise. For me that would be a reason to not use Things app.
Well I have done other crazy things to do workarounds for issues like this:
You might set up Siri dictation on the Mac and Open the reminders app.
Then you can read all the Things items from your iPhone and dictate each one into a new reminder.
This is slightly laborious and manual however you might be able to do a couple of hundred in one hour. Maybe this could work as a temporary measure.
If I was going to do it this way I would dictate all of them at once and be done with the process and then edit them later and possibly organized them into various folders.
That’s what I’m thinking. For now, the Things.sh mentioned above can tide me over. Dictating everything sounds laborious. I may just run two to-do lists until one runs dry. It’s not fun having two things to check, though.
Well yes is does “Sound” laborious but I might urge you to give it a quick test. When I did this I was pleasantly surprised how easy it worked out for me (my reminders were many but generally simple).
Also I used Siri to speak the reminder but also used the keyboard to create the next record etc…
I recently converted Things tasks to spreadsheet format following instructions here:
Closed Things. Made a copy of the sql file. Used an app from Setapp “Base” to read and export a spreadsheet readable file (text or SYLK format) from the table “TMTask”.
Current tasks have status=0, type=0, and trashed=0.
From there, you could save just the “title” column as a text file and import to Reminders. One possible approach:
