It was like a fresh shower of simplicity reentering my task management. I personally switched BACK to Things after AGAIN losing control over my OmniFocus db. Although, according to the Things blog ( ) there are changes to be expected which are not simply optical and supposedly also not limited to iOS, but that’s a big maybe. Hey there, nice read with very valid points. Sometimes “stagnant” also means “unsurprising and reliable”, which might be what I need in a productivity system… I think I’ll be sticking with it for a while longer. Plus I came to Things *after* they added sync, so I’ve not been embittered by that long wait. As it is, at least there are bug fixes and, say, updates for Mavericks. If I thought Things wasn’t supported at all any more, I’d switch away. Especially if, like me, there’s a temptation to play with your productivity system instead of being productive □ On the other hand, I switched away from a previous system because it was getting too many updates - the constant innovation meant it felt like I was trying to be productive on shifting sands, and existing features would get broken every now and again, because they just do, when you’re always adding new things. I use Things (having switched from a web-based tool because native apps just seem easier to shuffle things around in.) And I know what you mean about its lack of updates. It’s added a little more friction and a little more religion to my task tracking process, but it’s also done something Things hasn’t done in years – it’s new bevy of functionality has me asking one of my favorite engineering questions, “How can I do this better?” I’ve been using Asana on and off for a year. Over the course of the weekend, I moved everything I’m tracking into Asana. Or do I? How can I trust that I’m using the state of the art in productivity systems when I’m using an application that took over two years to land sync I could easily use? What other innovations are they struggling to land in the application? Why hasn’t the artwork changed in forever? What is that smell? That smell is stagnation. “Things does these things well,” I thought to myself, “I don’t need anything else.” Part of me has been fine with this lack of change because I don’t need my productivity system to do much more than capture a task, allow me to easily categorize and prioritize tasks, make it easy to search and filter them, and do all this work frictionlessly. I was performing my morning scrub on Things when I realized that nothing much had changed in Things UI in, well, years. The issue that pushed me over the edge had nothing to do with functionality or stability, but stagnation. Data corruption is usually grounds for immediate application deletion, but, again, Things integrated easily into my day, I knew all all the keyboard commands, so I went back to running a single instance. Yes, I threw my Things database into Dropbox until the inevitable collision occurred by having two versions of the application running on different machines. I stuck with Things for the many years it lacked a credible sync strategy. The interface was simple, the application was stable, and, again, it stayed out of my way so I could focus on doing the work rather than worrying about doing the work. I was initially enamored with it because the application forced very little religion on me and also easily adapted to my different productivity experiments I wanted to develop. I’ve used Things longer than any other productivity system this weekend I threw it away.
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