It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s almost magical… you run across an application that changes you. It makes you want to be better, your habits change, your work style changes and overall you improve. There are only a handful of apps that have brought about this experience. Basecamp changed the way I did project management. After years of hating project management and only seeing it as a means to an end (designing for clients) I began to like it, mainly because there was a tool that helped me succeed. Quicksilver helped me find stuff faster and really forced me to learn keyboard shortcuts instead of always reaching for my mouse. Textmate taught me to love to hand-coding. All tools to reach an end, all of them helped me to improve in some way.
In this last week I’ve picked up Things, granted it’s only been a week but its really caused me to look at tasks differently. I’m changing bad habits and becoming genially better at staying focused. As I’ve said in the past, I’m a detailed person, I’m already fairly organized, but this is different. It’s not a strict GTD regimen, you can scale it as far as you want. If you just need to manage a small set of tasks it’s great, if you have tens of projects with hundreds of tasks over months of time it’s great for that as well.
Shawn Blanc recently wrote up a really nice (more eloquent) review of Things and he said it best:
For better or for worse, I am a naturally organized person, and my brain is always thinking things through. Which means I don’t very much want a task management app for the sake of remembering something, but rather for the sake of forgetting it.
That’s it, it’s about forgetting not remembering. For those of us that are constantly thinking, looking forward and missing out on the present moment, Things is the app for us.
