Things for iPad

Things 1.3.2

I love productivity systems. The processes that people use to categorize, organize, and go about the daily business of life are for some reason endlessly fascinating to me. Perhaps its a misguided belief that organization and motivation are somehow intertwined. One of the most popular productivity systems is the aptly named “Getting Things Done,” (or GTD) by David Allen. After first explaining the system in his book, Allen provides a blueprint for applying it using physical tools. There have been many attempts to replicate his system in a software application including Cultured Code’s very wonderful Things. I’ve used Things for more than a year now and have been using the iPad version for over a month.

The first thing you notice about Things is its design. Like its desktop counterpart, the iPad version is elegant and beautiful. The app never feels cluttered, even with a lot of information on the screen. Its implementation of GTD feels ambitious. Unlike a number of other Apps used for GTD that are essentially glorified to-do lists (think GTD level one), Things for iPad attempts to provide a greater vertical snapshot of all levels of your GTD picture. The app shows you your current Areas of Focus, which could be your professional life, your health, and your finances. Within your areas of focus there are specific projects that might be related, like “Looking for a new job,” or “Losing Weight.” Finally, each project is made up of all the individual to-do’s you’ve come up with necessary to completing the project like “Spend 1 hour updating resume” or “Run 10 miles.” The iPad app also syncs over local wifi to the desktop application, a nice feature for those of us that use both.

moving a to-do

After using the app for a few days, I started to find rough edges behind the Things lovely front door. In GTD, efficiency is king. Even something as mundane as moving a to-do from one project to another needs to be as painless as possible, otherwise over the course of hundreds of to-do’s you’re going to subconsciously resist doing it. In Apple’s “Mail” app, moving an e-mail from one folder to another takes two taps. In Things, moving a to-do from one folder to another takes four. Taking a to-do that you’ve created and assigning it to a project you’ve created with a due date requires nine. In the touch-screen iWorld, all these taps feel like such a missed opportunity. Things is assembled with a point-and-click philosophy. Rather than the interface moving and interacting with me organically, actions are accomplished through a burdensome menu system.

"Things" navigation bar

Cultured Code made some odd decisions and omissions in it’s implementation of GTD. For instance, the Things navigation bar always includes each of my individual Areas of Focus but not a list of my Projects. Remember, in GTD, within Area’s of Focus you have Projects and within Projects you have all the to-dos associated with that project. But in Things, when you click on a specific area of focus you see all the To-Do’s attached to projects in that group but not the projects. Without the project associations a list of all the to-dos I have pending in my “Relationships” area of focus is completely unhelpful. To get to my projects I have to tap on “Projects” which then brings them up in little notebook icons that are clustered by Areas of Focus. It seems as though it would have been much more functional if “Areas of Focus” and “Projects” worked the way the other one did.

Perhaps Cultured Code meant for their iPad app to be more of an on-the-go To-Do list that provides a picture of the rest of your GTD system when necessary. In that case its puzzling why the app omits some of the functionality that other more streamlined to-do apps have but is at least four times the price. For instance you can’t schedule recurring to-do’s in the Things, a feature that ‘Todo‘ ($5), Toodledo ($2), and the newly released ‘Awesome Note‘ ($5) all have. Every one of those apps also has some version of “Projects,” and the app ‘Todo‘ even has Areas of Focus.

At $20, Things is the most expensive GTD app in the AppStore. While pretty, it suffers from some bizarre design choices and frustrating omissions compared to some other considerably less pricey options. If you’ve already personally implemented the desktop version and are just looking for a convenient way to bring all of the information living on your desktop along with you, than Things for the iPad is a satisfying experience. If not there are FAR better options in the Appstore at the moment.

I give it 2 complete action items out of 5