Reminder of Things

It feels like to-do lists peaked about a decade and a half ago. (Perhaps like so many things, but I digress.) It was the heyday of Getting Things Done and Inbox Zero and all the apps you can imagine to manage your items to do, like OmniFocus and—my personal favourite—Things.

I appreciated Things for its design. It was clean and uncluttered and simple. It didn’t overcomplicate things. It’s been my go-to to-do organizer since 2008.

Long gone, for me, are the days of managing a full time job, running an online store, putting on conference talks and workshops, and raising two kids. As such, my list of projects, professionally and personally, have whittled down to very little.

This more simple life has me contemplating a move to Apple Reminders. To be clear, it’s not because Reminders is a better app; it’s not. There a number of design decisions that have me scratching my head. The use of icons, showing notes (and clipping them), the use of colour, the boxes in the sidebar, and the SF Rounded all make the app overly and unnecessarily cluttered.  

So why move when Things works just fine?

Goooood question.

I should mention why I use Reminders: collaborative lists and Siri/HomePod integration.

I take advantage of Reminders for its Siri integration, which is great when I’m in the kitchen and want to quickly add something to the Groceries list. Things’ Siri integration hasn’t exactly been smooth and I blame Apple for that. I run into issues constantly with Siri not recognizing third-party apps all that well and timing out, specifically from the HomePods. (I have a number of issues with HomePods in general, to be clear, but that’s another topic for another day.)

If I’m already using Reminders then there’s a (tiny little) small mental load when deciding where to put something new. Throw in Notes, which can do lists, and I’m muddying the waters even more. For example, I have my list of taco restaurants in Notes. I have a list of things I want to buy, like a new kitchen knife, that I keep in Reminders. I’m planning a trip and need to plan flights and hotel and restaurants and I put that in Things. Why any of these go into one place or another feels rather arbitrary.

Getting rid of Things is about simplifying. It’s about reducing noise.

I’ve kept Things on my devices for now while I play around with using Reminders with more regularity. We’ll see if I stick with it.

Jeff Adams mentioned to me on Mastodon that Marco Arment’s Unforgetful works as a front-end for Reminders. I love the idea of apps providing a different view of the underlying data and perhaps an app will come along that has the simplicity of Things while using the data of Reminders. That would provide the best of both worlds, for me. (The urge to learn to make Apple apps is increasing.)