Bottom Line: Things 3 is a masterclass in opinionated design, offering unparalleled clarity and focus for those willing to submit to its rigid, beautiful, and Apple-exclusive workflow.
The soul of Things 3 is its prescriptive nature. It is an opinionated piece of software, and its opinions on how to be productive are ruthlessly enforced through its design. The primary workflow is a gentle but firm push through the classic "Get Things Done" (GTD) methodology: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. Your journey with any task begins in the Inbox, a digital purgatory for thoughts, reminders, and links forwarded from other apps. The first act of your day is often triaging this inbox, a process that forces you to decide if an item is trash, a reference, or an action.
The Tyranny of 'Today'
The app's most powerful and defining feature is the Today list. This is not merely a list of tasks due today; it is a curated agenda that you build. Things 3 will automatically add items with a deadline of today, but its real power lies in the manual selection of tasks you intend to work on. This simple act of planning creates a finite, achievable list, transforming an overwhelming "everything" list into a manageable daily docket. It's a psychological masterstroke. The friction of adding yet another item to an already full Today list is often enough to force a realistic assessment of one's time and energy. It's a built-in defense against the over-ambitious planning that dooms so many productivity systems. The one area where this feels dated is the input itself. There is no smart parsing of dates or natural language input; you are clicking and tapping through date pickers like a digital bureaucrat.
Form Follows Function
The organizational structure is clear and effective for its purpose. Areas serve as broad categories for your life (e.g., "Work," "Personal," "Finances"), and within them, Projects represent goals with a defined end-state. The ability to add structure with non-actionable Headings inside a project is a surprisingly potent tool for breaking down a complex initiative into phases. This is where Things 3 shines: planning a vacation, outlining a report, or managing a multi-stage creative endeavor.
Where it falters is in the murkier, non-project work that defines modern life. It has no elegant solution for "areas of ongoing responsibility." A tag-based system exists, but it feels secondary to the core hierarchical model. If your work is less about discrete projects and more about continuous streams of tasks related to a role, the system can feel constricting. You are forced to either use tags as a workaround or create "fake" projects that never truly end, cluttering your view.