Stay Organized with Things 3

1. Introduction: Welcome to this course on staying organized with things three by cultured code, things three is a macOS, iOS, iPadOS specific task manager. If you're on Android or Windows, this is probably not the Task Manager you're going to be looking for. Also, if you're looking for a collaborative task manager, this is probably not the one you're gonna be looking for it because things three has no collaboration features. But despite not having Android support or Windows support or collaboration features things three is my task manager of choice because I am on all of Apple's platforms and because of its light touch when things are overdue, where some task manager show you a whole bunch of red and they kinda blare at you and say whole bunch of stuff about why it's bad. You have something overdue. Things. Three is a very light touch. You just add something to your to-do list and it says it's there to do that's it. It doesn't make you feel guilty about not getting to things like we all do not get to things sometimes over this course, we'll cover what are your areas, projects and tasks will cover things, sink will cover reminders, integration, we'll cover how to use it with shortcuts will cover ipad OS and macOS and how to use things three, I've been using things through to run a YouTube channel, to run all of my client projects on my programming business, to run all the courses that I put out on Skillshare and only membership site. And it is always the task manager that I keep coming back to you no matter what, trying other things and there are other features, another task managers, but the light touch of things through the excellent keyboard commands support everything keeps me coming back to things three, you'd like to find out more about my YouTube channel. You can find a link to that below. Or if you go to Curtis mikael.ca, you can find my site with all of my videos. By the end of this course, you will have a good handle on if things three is the right Task Manager for you. 2. Interface Tour: In this lesson, we're going to go over a basic interface tour of things three. You can see this is my active things three window. And then I have a number of things already in it and we'll go over those. So start off as your inbox. This is where all of your tasks are going to collect when you enter them. We've talked about task entry in the future. Today. There's all the things you shouldn't be doing that you should have on today. Now, some of these, as I've said, actually are overdue or no longer my plate. I haven't had a chance to clean up my things three Inbox today, but we'll talk about that in the future as well. Upcoming. This is all the things that are coming up for you. So you can see that I have to write a member newsletter and invoice someone on Friday. Anytime list is for tasks that are in your database, but don't have any specific time on them, so you can do them anytime you want. Now the Sunday list is a little different from anytime Someday is for tasks that you could do someday if you want it. I actually don't like using the Someday list because I feel like it's too cluttered with a whole bunch of wishful thinking that you're never actually going to do. And so when you do your weekly review, when you go through your tasks, you kinda feel guilty about what's there. Something that could go in this maybe is another course that I was going to do. And I would say someday, I will do another course on writing well or reading well. So you manually apply this to a task under the date right here. You can type someday if you want. I don't use them, so I am not going to cover this again. Logbook. Log book is a history of all the things that you have already done. I don't really ever look at this. I actually haven't set up and I'll show you this to work with obsidian. Obsidian logs, each task on the day it was done. And then I can go back to your website in a database if I want to see tasks I have done. Then finally we have the trash. Trash is where tasks go that you have deleted so you can keep track of them later on if you really need to go get them. Again, I don't really ever looking at us because when I delete a task, it's because I'm not going to do it because it's no longer irrelevant because it's just not going to check it off as it's completed tasks because I don't want it to have that status in my vault. Some other places you can look for different interface elements in things three is in the settings. So there's lots of different settings will cover some of these as we go. Alright, our general settings, how you want our items to be moved to the logbook, right? We can do immediately, daily or manually. We can change the badge count. We can go to things cloud as well. We can change our Quick Entry keyboard commands which will cover, you can change how it interfaces with reminders. And we can also bring up our calendar if we want, and we'll talk about those, some of these specific features specifically in future lessons. Next up we're gonna go over specifically what areas, projects, tasks, and headings are so that you can organize your tasks in your projects. 3. Areas - Projects - Tasks - Headings: So next up in the interface we have areas, projects, tasks, and headings for organization. So you can see I normally have these four areas. Have clients, I have Admin, I have business, and they have personal. Now, these allow me to collect different projects inside of them. So right now I have one for the focus course and I have one for a client called Prof pups. We can add a new area by clicking new list in the bottom corner. And then we choose between area and project. And then you can create that. You also notice that I have another one called proud city. He has multiple projects inside it for one client. So I have broken them out because I'm mainly working for them as a programmer and they have multiple projects on the go at a time that I need to keep tasks for and information for. Now, one other thing to note is in the bottom of everything on MacOS, we have this action bar in the bottom, which lets us do multiple things. Lets me add a new to-do. And you can see I also have command N as it keyboard command. I can add a new project or with Command Option N. I could add calendars to this or when we'll talk about when in a bit, I can move something that I had selected. You can see those two are grayed out because there's nothing to do with them. Or I can quickly access the QuickFind or search. Now when I move over to Marin watershed, you can see that I actually have, again the same. I have new todo, but now it's also said new heading. So my new project change to new heading because this is a different way of organizing inside a project, now projects or for a related set of tasks. And you can see this with mirror and watershed. Projects allow me to have a note area up here where I can put unrelated material. So for me, Trello and Slack contain a lot of the items in the discussions around this project, around launching the site. And I can go back to those if I want without having to go search through Slack or search through Trello, I can go directly to them because I recorded their main areas. Now, I suggest that you do that when you have a project, if there's other ancillary material that goes with it, you create a link to something. So whether that's an email, if it's just one or if there's a lot of related notes, maybe to a note-taking tool like obsidian or craft to that actual note where you have all the other information recorded. I've also done headings in here, so headings are movable and you access those with a quick action bar at the bottom or with Shift Command, and I can create a heading. So I've used these here to make some organization decisions. So I have questions. I have two about wanting to hear from Jeff about the regex stuff. And do I have Example redirects from Kevin? So before I can really do the project and need these two questions answered, I will have to go through that. I'll go through that tomorrow morning extra because I know this project is in theory lined up for tomorrow afternoon. Now I've also used a heading two line where I have to do a task, right? So Bluehost, I have to create redirects here for these three things on Bluehost. And then I also need in WordPress, which is their CMS need to go and check the redirects that they have on their spreadsheet to make sure that they're set up properly. And all of these things are tasks, right? If I double-click, you can say actually have a link to a Slack conversation about my discussion with Jeff about the rejects questions so I can have it answered. I also have here more information from Kevin about the redirects that I'll need to do with links and with notes to different tasks, to different spots and files that I don't have to go looking for this material later. And that's really how you're going to organize your things. Three, overall, you can use your areas for your main areas of focus. I use this. I have a specific one for a client because this one has a lot of work right now. And then I have my main areas of focus. You're going to use your projects to have for your projects where you have multiple things need to get done for one encapsulated project and use your tasks for those tasks and use headings to help organize them. I don't always use headings for everything, but they can help organization when you have a more complex project, but it's more steps in it. 4. Your First Task: In this lesson, we're going to cover how to add a task of things three in macOS. Now, most often when I add a task to things through, I'm actually doing something else. So I'm looking at an email or I'm looking at something else that has created a task that needs to be kept track of. And that means I often do it by using a keyboard command. In my case, it's Control Option space. And it brings up the quick entry window. So this allows me to create a task. So new task, I hit tab, I can enter note for task, and then it lets me set all the rest of the parameters I can set when this is when I should work on something. This is not a deadline. In theory, I use when I want to work on something on Tuesday, I want to be reminded of it on Tuesday. I often find that a lot of things get stacked up for a Friday because my intent is to review them for next week. Tags. So tags allow me to find different tasks across different projects. So say a hardware where I have my daughter's bedroom that I'm working on right now. I did drywall on the weekend and I may have I have some chairs I need to buy some screws for. I know that as winter is coming, I need to put some grip on my stairs because when we moved in in December, it was way too cold, but grip on the stairs and they are really slippery in the snow. Those tasks all get tagged as hardware. So when I go to the hardware store, I can look at hardware, the tag and see everything I need to buy at the hardware store. We also have checklists. So I can put something in here. List task, this is like sub-items. So if an a packing list, I often use this so I make the main task, someone's name, and then I make the items you need to take the checklist items in there. Then this flag here is actually four deadline. So I use deadline when something bad will happen. So say if I don't do this by a certain day, then I'll have to pay a penalty on my taxes. I need to pay my mortgage or something like that is when something bad is going to happen. Then finally, by default, this will move into your inbox. Now, I could choose another project if this is specific to a project right away, if I wanted to, now that would do that by simply typing the projects. So say this is a proud city. When I type proud city, you can see I have an icon for proud city area and proud city as a project. So it's only recently that I started proud city with an area on its own and tasks can go into an area. So I'll actually likely drop the proud city project and add proud city as an area instead and focus any task that's just general for that client in that area instead than any project that has a specific task for it, I'll create a project under the proud city area, and then I'll add a task specific to a project, to that project inside the area. Now there's one other task entry or task thing that you can do is I can come into an existing task. And it says today, I can click on today. There's actually this other one that says this evening. Now you can really only access that when you're looking at it, the day task, something you'd organized in the morning again this evening. You see it moved to this evening. I don't actually want to do that this evening. I want to do that today. So we will take that and hit today, which is Command T as a keyboard command. That's one other. Again note which I'm sure a few times is learn all the keyboard commands and things. Three, there are so many and they let you do so much directly without actually grabbing your mouse or your trackpad to work with the interface. They also work on your iPad if you want that. So they are really useful for those people that want to be a keyboard specific like I do now, there are some other ways to enter task because you can use ray cast, you can use Alfred. Some email clients like spark will have a direct integration to send items two things, three, so that you can have a link back to the email specifically in Spark. I don't use a lot of those as my extra ways, but I will show you some of them later on. I'll show you an integration with obsidian and the log book that I've used before. And you can also send tasks from obsidian into things three, if you'd like. But we'll cover those things later. No other ways to add tasks that I've already pointed out is also with the plus button in the bottom. And then we'll actually cover the Magic Plus button on iOS. Excellent. As a drag-and-drop tool, lets you add an area, a project, or a task, just with dragging from the bottom corner of your iPhone or your iPad to the different area or to the different spot you want it. And it kinda knows what it should do based on where you've dragged it will cover the Magic Plus button in a future video. 5. Things Calendar Integration: Welcome. In this lesson we're going to look at the calendar integration for things 31 thing I often have to deal with because I'm a dad. I've got three kids. My wife works in the evenings, so I have to take all the kids to go to their sports is different. Activities that come up in my date right on top of meetings, on top of everything else. I bet just got a lot of stuff going on. That's one place where the things three, calendar integration can really help me. If you don't have the calendar integration turned on, you'll often see a dialog here telling you you can turn it on. So if I hit no thanks, it'll disappear it, I won't see it again. But if I hit Show Events, it'll take me and just show me the events. Now you access that by going to your settings, which I accessed by hitting Command comma. You go to Calendar and then there'll be toggled, toggled on. So this is where I can even select certain calendars I don't want Let's have the adults That's our family calendar just for the adults, families on my children get access to that as well. Alright. I don't need client's schedule. I don't need contacts. Don't need streak. Um, I need my wife's calendar. Those contacts. I don't need it in multiple. And you do need that one. It's not have a list of things that are upcoming for me, right. I can see tomorrow I have or nope. So this is just a blocker for my own calendaring system. It kinda overlaps with the meeting. So you don't have extra calendars or extra meetings come in from Calendly. I have it releases all day. And my wife works at 15:33, 30 and just gives me an idea of what's going on. You also see calendar events in the today view. So I can see that today is Thanksgiving. And then it says here that my wife works and my daughter's case. They don't actually do that today. It's just still on the calendar for some reason. So this is useful in planning, especially in the upcoming view, and we'll cover that in a later video and how I use it to do some planning with my tasks for so I don't get myself overloaded it for a day, night. Biggest issue with the calendar view is that there's no week view like you'd see in a tool like tick, tick, where I can actually drag tasks out to the week and I can really dig into what I need to do for the weekend, schedule my tasks appropriately in the midst of all my meetings. In the next lesson, we'll look at things through search. 6. Things Search: This lesson, take a look at the search quickly. For things to be as an excellent search access by typing command F. And I can go to stuff like my upcoming view. But more importantly, I actually use it for accessing things like my tags like this week or next week tech. I find this much more useful to be able to do, to access it this way. In my iPad, want to have a keyboard attached, or in macOS, when I always have a keyboard attached from my phone, the easiest way to do this is actually do pull down. You'll find the search and then you can just type the search to access the different things you need. Most often I do this when I'm out and say shopping for different supplies for the host as we do renovations and I'm looking for say, my hardware tag. And I can find my hardware tag and find everything I need to buy at the hardware store. In addition to just being able to find tags, you can actually even find tasks. So I know I have an arcing one now, and because I'm copying too big hard drives between each other and this is one hard drive is failing. So I need to just keep track with the command for a couple of days until I've done all the copying of this. Because this command will actually already pick up where it left off all the time because I'm transferring multiple terabytes of data. So I can go back and find this really easily when the car dad was dropped off. I need to restart the copy again. The next lesson we will look at the reminders integration between things three. 7. Things and Reminders: In this lesson, we're gonna look at the reminders integration between things three and reminders for iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, one of the easiest ways to add tasks via your voice to things three is via the reminders integration. You can access that by going into the settings. And you're gonna look at reminders. And now you can choose to show to-dos from like I say, address change or inbox. So inboxes really the one I want and this is going to allow me to add different tasks. Now because we don't trigger all my devices. Let's open up reminders and we can see how fastest really works. So we'll add a task. Here. This is a test task. You can see instantly it showed up over here and then I can now import all important. Notice that it got removed from this side. So the tasks when they get imported, get deleted from reminders at the same time. This means that I can do it from my iPhone SE when I'm out on a run, I can ask Apple's Reminders device so I don't trigger to say its name, to add a task to remind me to do something later. And that will show up in my inbox and then I can actually look at it. Now one thing you'll note at the bottom of the settings here is that what will not be imported to do is with attachments, sub-tasks or location-based reminders don't get show up, don't show up because things three doesn't have support for importing the subtasks. It does have support for its own checklist, but not for importing subtasks. It does not have support for location-based reminders, and it does not have support for attachment. So those things do not get imported. And you're going to import all of your minors at once. There's actually a specific tool you can use to import all your reminders to things three at once. So use that instead of just importing from your inbox with this integration. 8. Things Cloud Sync: Now almost all of us have multiple devices we use to manage your tasks. This is where you need to sync your tasks between your devices easily and quickly reliably is where things three, sink comes in or things cloud comes in to access that we can go to our settings. I'm gonna hit Command comma and we go to Things cloud you can see it's already toggled on. So I'm going to actually talk about off disabled things cloud and it'll toggle it on so you can see how we set it up, toggle it on. I'm going to login. It's going to ask me for my e-mail and ask me for my password as well. I store this in one password, copy my password out, paste it in, and then continue. Now a few different options I can keep all to-dos, so it's going to take all the to-dos from the database online and my Mac and sync them together. That's going to keep only the ones from things cloud. Or I can keep only the two just from this Mac. Now since I just toggle this off and on, I'm just going to choose only from things cloud. Most times when I've reset this up, I know where I want to keep. I want to keep everything from the Cloud because I'm setting up a new computer or I want to keep everything from this Mac, or I want to delete everything because I don't actually care anymore because it's been awhile since I've used things three and all the tasks are updated. For now, I'm gonna keep only to-dos from things cloud and continue. Well now it kind of jumped off from either screaming, you see, it's updating my to-dos with things clouds. So it's deleting everything I had, which was exactly the same, matching as Things cloud and on backup and running with my tasks. This really sinks almost instantly. If I really work at it, I can add a task on my Mac and then grab my iPad and see the task show up like if I really work at it, but ultimately, you never really do that yet to task, then you go do something else. You pick up your phone, you walk out the door to go run an errand and then you look at your tasks. And in that case, things three sinks instantly. It's so close as to be incident, so you'll never notice the difference. 9. Mail to Things: Now we'll look at mail to things so you can actually e-mail tasks into things with their service. Tax that's not going to go to our settings with Command comma. And then I can go to manage. Under male two things that I haven't checked. So this tells me some information. What I can do. I can add todos to my inbox by sending two things. Cloud descended from basically anywhere, I can automate a service like IFTTT or Zapier, which we'll look at different, say, web events and send them. I can not send attachments because there's no attachments and things three and my e-mails are limited to 2000 characters. As a note, the most important thing is right at the bottom. It's like kind of blanked out so you can't see it is the add to things e-mail address. So I would add this in my contacts, in my email client as say things three task or a new task or something like that. That denotes to me that this is going to create a new task in my inbox. It's also not going to create a link to a Gmail account or anything like that. But if you are out on your email, if you're looking at your phone, this can be a really good way to know, say no that something happened to blog posts came up. So when a blog post comes up, an RSS feed triggers IFTTT and reminds you to actually publish a blog post or say something about it, advertise it so that you know what's there. I don't use this a ton, but depending on your workflow, I have used this in the past for things like that will stay with the blog post. Make sure you keep this e-mail private because if anyone gets this, they can send tasks to you. So you in theory, you could share it with your partner. So they can send tasks into that, things that need to get done. So get an oil change on the car, stuff like that so that, you know what's there, they know it's there and then it's in your tasks for later. The next lesson, we're gonna look at the Magic Plus button. 10. Magic Plus Button: This lesson, we'll look at the Magic Plus button. You can see here, I have my things three project open to this things three course. In the bottom right-hand corner, I have a plus button. So what I can do with this on the iPhone is I can drag it up and I can add, say, a new task here. Or even better yet, I could drag it down to the bottom corner and add to my inbox, this is a new plus task. Safe. Now if I want to cancel the interaction in the middle, I can start dragging. Go wait, actually I want to add it back to the same spot. Now it can also use this to add a list if I wanted. This would be a new project. Test project. Now, well, this is all good and fine. On your iPhone, there's actually a bit more functionality because you have more screen real estate on your iPad. So let's take a look at that. So here I am on my iPad and in this case, I can actually do a few things with Magic Plus button. Got it from the bottom corner. You can see I still have my inbox right here. I can use it to create a new list here, right? So I can have a new iPad test list. Or it could also use it to add some teacher today. If I was on the upcoming view, I can add it to any day I want and just bring the task in hand they want or add a list. So I think that Magic Plus button on the iPad, especially if you don't have a keyboard attached, is an excellent way to do this, to add tasks or to add lists quickly. And it's a really nice feature from things three that just makes your interaction with the applications so much nicer. The next lesson we'll take a look at shortcuts and things three. 11. Things Shortcuts: Let's take a look at shortcuts for things three. So a few shortcuts I have set up. First off, we're gonna look at my new tasks shortcut. This doesn't make a lot of sense on MacOS because I can just use a quick keyboard command to add a task two things, three, from anywhere. But an iPad OS, I can't spell. Look at my screen right now. And iPadOS, you can see I don't have things accessible anywhere, but if I want to add a new task, I can swipe down and I've actually already selected new tasks. So let's type it in. New task and I have my new things task, I can add that and I can say test shortcut task, that's a title. And if there's a note, I've added a new task to my things inbox. So we can open that up by going two things. Inbox, I have a new shortcut task with a note in it does make sense here for sure. And if I show you that you can look at macOS. I'll show you what the shortcut looks like because these sync between different devices. So this is the shortcut and macOS and I can create it here. Thankfully, with iOS, iPadOS, iOS, MacOS, most recent is not 16, 15, that generation things actually sync. All its tasks are all shortcuts used to have to determine if you're on MacOS or iOS or whatever, and then switch between them, your shortcuts, but now you don't have to, you can just use these single task or the single option. So the first thing we do here is we're going to add ask for input. So we use the ask for input and we're looking for texts and we label it as task title. And then we asked for notes, and now we're adding them both to our task really. This is one thing where I think things through as an issue which we'll talk about a little bit later. The issues with it is that I can't necessarily choose at the time of task creation. I can't necessarily choose which list because there's no way to add a variable here, a parameter here. I just add task title to my tasks and add it to my notes. And if I check this edit and things, it'll actually open it up in the quick switcher on MacOS or to open it up in things three on iPad, OS or iOS. Then you also want to always make sure you check, Show and run and just, just takes away some of the UI first shortcuts for you so you don't have to see it pop up at the top of your screen. So another shortcut I use regularly actually use this on MacOS with re-cast is to go between my different tags. You can see I have here choose from menu, and I have different tags right here. And then I just use a condition to switch between this week's show me this week tag, next week, show my next week tag. And so in practice, this works like this. If I say Show tags, stasis things, show tags, hit Enter, and I can choose which one. Let's say we'll show this week and it shows me this week. Tag things three, there's gonna be faster for me when I'm working on different projects. And I can just jump to this week tag easily to see what's up this week. As I go with macOS, this also again, clearly works on iPadOS or iOS if you want to go to a tag quickly that way. But because I've specified the tags I want to go to, it doesn't know. So I can jump to an arbitrary tag, go to the ones that I've already defined with the things shortcuts. Now one of the final and most powerful ways to really work with things three and shortcuts is that things URL scheme, there is a things URL scheme builder which is the best place to start because also the most complex way for you to build them. What does this allow you to do? If I come down here, I have different options. I can add a task at a project, update a project, or up to the task story updated project, show search JSON. So this means that I can demonstrate that a task, right? So we're gonna say new from URL. And now I can add multiple to do titles. Here if I wanted to, I could add multiple items, multiple tasks. I can also add different checklists. So this would be check list item two, item three. And what you can see it's doing here is building me a special URL. So it says things colon, triple slash, add a question mark, and then it starts adding a title equals new present 20 is the Space Task percent 20 space from URL and checklists. So this is adding URL parameters. I come up from a development background. So this makes sense to me as adding what it's doing as far as people using it, actually think it's fairly complex, but it can be quite powerful as well. So if I go back over to shortcuts, I go to my things, three tasks and I look at, say, my new book project. I felt like my new book project here I open it. You can see I have asked for text with book title. So what I did is I built a URL with all the different subtasks I'd need for a project. And then I took that URL and paste it in the run things URL shortcut action. And then I changed out one item for parameter, right? And actually also did the replay. So replace space with percent 20 so that it actually gets formatted properly. So what I'm gonna do a new book review, it will run this URL, which will give you the title of whatever texts I put it. It'll add it to my content area. It'll add the to-dos copy notes, move notes. So I can kind of read this because I'm familiar with Development. Alright? Alright, so it's Write, Post, Edit, Post, find image for post, publish, post. So this will add a new book project for me in a content area. Now I haven't actually used this in a bit. I don't have a content area right now, so I need to change that area to something else that I have currently in my things three database if I wanted to run this, this is part one of the most powerful ones, but again, one of the most difficult ones to work with. It is the one you'll probably struggle with most as you try to add parameters later. I would love to see things through better shortcuts actions. So you can do more from there, built in shortcuts. So there's more parameters, right? As I said, with my new task one, I'd love to see more parameters involved with say the list with a wet, with everything else so that you can do more with it without needing to result to the URL schemes that are just more complex to use. Now, if you do create a bunch of different URL schemes, bunch of different shortcuts and you want to run them. I actually recommend that you run a user a run things, shortcuts. So this just runs different sub shortcuts. So I have different projects, a book project, GoDaddy project when I was writing for them, Liquid Web Friday content video project. And what this does is it just uses a condition. And if it's run book project at runs that shortcut. If it runs, so GoDaddy one, it runs that shortcut. And then it lets me run any of my new projects, create new project in things from a shortcut without digging to a specific one, I can just remember to look for the wrong thing, shortcut and run that specific shortcut or choose from that menu list to see what I need to run. The next lesson we'll look at shortcuts again and we'll look at kind of a hack to get location-based reminders into things three. 12. Location Based Tasks: We're going to look at hacking location-based reminders and things three. To do that, we're going to go to our shortcuts. We're going to open up Shortcuts. And then the bottom, we're going to look at automation. You can see I already have one setup and it says when I arrive at Home Depot, show a specific list. In this case, I've used the hardware tag, as you can see right at the top, it says hardware. Let's add this because there are other places I am going to go to. So I'm going to create a personal automation. Unfortunately, these do not sync between devices, so you have to set this up on each device, which is why I'm taking the time now to set it up on my phone because I don't take my iPad with me all over when I arrive at the location. So I'm going to look at say, hardware, Prince George building center. There you go. This is on Central West and just looking at the different ones, home hardware. That's the right one. Yeah, that's the right one. I'll hit Done. And now I need to anytime anytime you arrive there, Let's try just looking for the app, then find the thing x3 icon. Let's quit a couple of times. Let me things that's what I want. So I'm gonna go to show list. And I don't want to show that today list. I want to show the hardware tag. So we can go back into edit automation and then done. So. Now when I arrive at either the Prince George building center or at the Home Depot, it will bring up the hardware list for me. It'll prompt me in a shortcut and do that. So we can actually demo that by doing something very similar to create a personal automation time of day. I'm recording this at 10:18, so let's redo this at 10:21 daily Next, and we're going to look again at an action so we can come down and we'll just go to things three app again. Things three, we're going to show list. You have to choose inbox for now it's not really the one I want. Let's go to Hardware. Next. 1021 daily. Done. Let's even revise that quickly. Let's just go to 1019 back. Done. You can see I prompted me for the show list. I can tap that. I can run it. Now has showed me the hardware list that I have. That's how it'll work when you get there, it'll buzz you on your phone and actually buzz my watch too because my watch is hooked up. It's a Garmin watches, sports watch, but it's hooked up to get notifications. It bugs me to let me know that there is something here. Now, if you're using focus modes, I have also allowed things to read to get through my focus modes. Through my personal one, I don't allow it to my workout one just because I ride my bike by there because when I ride my bike way there, I am not expecting to be able to pick up hardware items. So make sure you also deal with those as well. It's a bit of a hack, but it can work to get you location-based reminders and things. Three. 13. Automating Projects: In this lesson, we're going to take a little look at how to automate some of your projects tasks in things three, shortcuts because we already covered that. So one of the ways is to simply do a guess. It's called the Task paper format. So this is marked down. This is a dash with the task item. I can copy and paste all of those into things three. So let's go to my inbox. Easy place to clean up and paste. So now you can see I've got all three task items in there easily. There's gonna be nice if you keep lists, say an obsidian or some other node tool and you can just copy and paste them into the spot you want in iPadOS, iOS, whatever. Resolve these. Let's clean up a couple of other ones I have here two. Now one of the slightly more powerful ways is to use to wrap up drafts. You can see I have my task template here. I've installed a special tool with drafts called it the things parser. So this allows me to do stuff like say skiing. Say when, when do I want this? And I can do today. So now if I click on things parser, it set me up to skate, so I know that for skating today I need to get the trailer the trailer hitch, the bike bike, shoes, lights are when Tom and Laura is helmet Curtis on it and then eat and I need to make sure my oldest daughter has her mask, gloves, gates, neck. This can be good for whenever I have skis to pack stuff like that, a list to make sure that you remember all this stuff because the only time I didn't do this list last year, I forgot the ski boots for two gets. So that's another good way to do it. And it's also the way in shortcuts which I've already showed you, where you can create a URL with all the things you want in there. Now the nice thing about doing this is if I want another lights here, I can add a subtask, right? I can say I can say tail light runs like now I would have a checklist item with two sub-tasks are yours to subtask under my lights to say make sure I have a friend light and a tail light for riding my bike back and forth when I told the kids in the trailer. 14. Plan Your Week with Things 3: In this lesson, we're gonna look at how I use things for you to plan my week. Not one of the first things you need to do is to review your tasks to make sure you get a handle on them. I start with my Today view. I look through here and see what hasn't been done. I usually do this on a Friday right now it's a Monday because it's a holiday. But I will actually look through and see here what didn't I do last week, when I do in the last week, that needs to be adjusted. Cpt template for Kelo show, that's when my clients programming client and their e-mail updates. So one of the big things in here that I need to remember that some things shouldn't actually be in here at all or it may not do them. The e-mail updates that's actually done, I can resolve that. I don't need to worry about that. But then I get something like this bright mode WordPress theme. I don't actually need this as a task because I'm not going to do it as a task or what the best place to put this as if I bring my notes from my other screen over because I'm actually going to create a new note. We've got one on this side. This is obsidian if you're wandering and I'm going to say, or press themes. So this is going to be for my site, just themes I want to keep track of. So bright mode is one of them. Now, I don't actually need to keep this as a task because it's not really a task. It's not something I'm going to do this week. It's just when I have an opportunity to look for a new theme, I will look for it again. Let's get my notes back out of the way. That's one of the things that I'll do as I go through my today list or actually through all of my tasks. And other one is did I hear back from sad? That's something I need to keep up. This is my accounting. I need to make sure I get that. I'm going to select curves. So low to carve. Am I gonna do that? That's actually not going to be this week at all. That's going to be like a Friday task because I should be done this course by then, so I can actually focus on getting that done. So these things do still need to get done though. I need to record the final lessons which I'm actually doing right now. I do need to build that CPT template for Cal osha and do need to check in with Saj accounting. So the next thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to check my inbox. Is there anything in here? No, I don't need to worry about the sourcing command. This is literally just migrating some hard drives. This will be done really quick, so I can leave that in my inbox for now and I will just deal with it when I'm there Monday keeping track of this command. So because I have 100 that's dying and so it keeps dropping off and I need to keep running the command over and over. So the next thing is I'm going to check my this week tag to see if there's anything else that was in this week. I didn't actually get to some navbar links aren't working. I didn't get to that because it couldn't really get got two. So we have a bug on one of the sites where some links just stop working, but it didn't come up this week. I couldn't investigate it because I didn't see the problem and I can't reproduce it. So I have just left this, this will stay in this week because it's something I need to keep track of. In this case, I'm actually going to give it a date just so that it's on my Today view all the time ago Tuesday. They know that it's there. Now. I'd also look at my next week tags Randy from next week. Yes, there's a bunch here and I will go back to those, look at all of those and I will hit Shift Command T. And I will go at next week or this week. And I'll hit Shift Command T again. Unfortunately, I do this twice and take off the next week tag. So I've just taken everything from next week, which I had planned to do and moved into this week because I'm actually planning this week. Now. The other ones I would also do is I would look at this month. This month, is there anything else? Do video set up a city in not gonna do that this next week. So let's actually put that in my next week tag. And again, unfortunately, I have to do this twice because that's how this month I'm taking it out of this month for now. So there should be a next week tag. Now I can actually go through all my projects now they have some of these things, right? My inbox, three things and upcoming because I need to do those this week for sure. I should make sure I add this week tag to this, this week so I get planned this week. And this week, just so I make sure that they're on the schedule now and actually just look through the different projects to see if there's anything else that's already tagged this week. I don't need to worry about that. These two things are done. Well kill those. I don't need them anymore and I can even delete this heading. I don't need that. We did the Bluehost ones. I don't need to do that. So I just need to look at these two things and they'll be labeled as this week. So I will deal with them when they come up menu allowable. So it's the next feature I'm going to do. That's fine. I go over the issues and that's probably going to be a next one. Let's add the next month tag to it now. Anything else I have to next, next week, end of this week do video setup of obsidian. So we need to show them how to set it up for internal documentation. Some navbar links aren't working. I want to keep that up. The rest of these things I don't need to worry about. So this is an iPad test list. Again, it will just delete this. I don't even need it. And also there's another test project. Delete that project. What else is in here? Template, it's already labeled. Great. Check this area admin check in with Robin has a date on it, won't worry about it. Things three-course record final lesson. So I'm going to also going to add tag to this. Edit final lesson. This is going to be this week, thumbnails for all lessons. Maybe this y equals to again, usually would do Friday for this. They're gonna be able to publish on Skillshare. Now this is where I have to just start deciding, well, I have time on Friday to publish on Skillshare or not. I don't know if I'm gonna leave this as a next week, next week, next week, next week, next week. This is again, to finish off this course, I have a bunch of tags this week, this week, this week, and then I'm not sure. But if I have time on Friday, if I added all the lessons this week well, because I probably edit a lesson or two every morning before I start work, then I will have time to edit and move on to these next ones. So I'll just probably work through this project and Friday and get as far as I can on Friday, do my YouTube course. That's another one. This one's actually done. Is it not really sure about video? I'm going to check on that. That's an e-mail and easy to follow up with on Skillshare and I actually really need to let members. So let's schedule that for Friday. Members know the YouTube course and let's add a tag to it this week. By Friday email 2021 accounting. Do I hear back? That's it. And then my daughter's room, new tasks. There's nothing really to do in that right now. Usually just reserve this for again, hardware things gonna go purchase for her room. Not necessarily the exact task going to do that day. Remember, you can also keep them are tasked in areas that need to check all my areas as well. Any other client ones? There had men ones, no business, no recurring tasks. That's fine. Personal style. They've got other thing reviewed. I can open a new window and I can do that by hitting Control Command, and it'll open up a new window. Now this window specifically I want to be here. I want a better view on this. Okay, so this one over here, I'm going to make this week, this one over here, I'm gonna go to my upcoming view. So now I have an idea of what's upcoming. And I, because I have the screen real estate or I'll even make this taller so I can see more tomorrow, Tuesday. And what do I want to do? So I need to check this on Tuesday. You check this on Tuesday as well. So two things that need to actually do tomorrow. I know that navbar links or just something we can review as I go Wednesday. So what else do we have? About two levels of nesting. So I know Wednesday, I have no meetings, lots of time. So I can see that here. I have a 930 meeting that actually makes my day a little harder to get done sometimes because I have a 930 meeting. There's even a released tomorrow, although I think I'll push that off and won't do release until I get the two levels of nesting done. So I wouldn't worry about that. Thursday. No. What else do I have, right. They can see dates here, Wednesday, Tuesday. I can actually see when things are on there to hear back with a long subscript fusion message options. This is from a client. I'm actually going to follow that up on Friday and Friday for CPT template for Cal osha. So that honestly, I really can't do it this week looking at it. I've usually work on these type of things on Monday. So I'm gonna look at this task and I'm going to change my tag to next week. I hit Tab again. Take off this week. There we go. Record final lessons. I'm recording today. That's already in their final lessons. I'll do that over the week. You get thumbnails for all lessons. So let's just put a date on this. Edit final lessons. Let's put it in Tuesday. And this will means it shows up in my Today view all the time and get thumbnails. That'll probably be a Friday task. Youtube course, that's a Friday already and didn't hear back from savage, that is going to be a tomorrow task. In fact, this is probably going to be a two day task. Is it on today? It's already on today. I know I need to follow up on it. It's a holiday. It's all actually do it for tomorrow. And to follow up with my accountant to make sure that I have my taxes coming through. That's really all I do to review the tasks. One of the biggest things I think you need to do as review task is eliminate things you saw I eliminated and took that bright mode theme for my WordPress site and put it off to a node because there's not really a task. I'm not going to look at a new WordPress theme. When it comes time to really look at a new WordPress theme, I'll sort of project for that and I will look at the bright mode theme as part of that. I will not worry about it until that 0.1 of the biggest failings is people do not delete tasks. They do not take things away. They just think they're going to always do everything and then they never get anything. And they feel guilty because they have a huge backlog of things they need to do. 15. Things and other apps: In this lesson, we're gonna take a brief look at some of the integrations that you can have between other apps and things three, now by no means an exhaustive list. There's tons of applications out there that integrate with things 3.0 spark, the e-mail client Does. Alfred has some integrations with things through as well. There are lots of other things, but I want to show you the two that I use regularly. First off, as a ray cast or re-cast is a launcher. You can see it right here. And in this case I would search for things three, because lets me open the application, but it lets me do more than that. I can show different lists. I can add new to-dos. I can show my today list, show anytime. Let us show upcoming lists, show someday. Or I can even access the menu bar, which is a ray cast feature. Now, one of the powerful features it can have if you don't like the interface for the things three quick add tool is to add a task, right? So this can be recast task. I can add my notes for re-cast. I can add the inbox. Let's add it there. I got any tags I want. I can have checklist items if I wanted to do that. I could add a deadline. It doesn't allow when, which is what I use more often. So I would usually just add it to the those. You just add it to my inbox. I can hit Command Enter. And I added my new to do, and I can add another one real quickly. Again, this is a nice thing, whereas in the things three, quick add tool, I'd have to add a new T3 task notes. For that task, I can add all the thing or they can even add the one date and I hit Enter, but I have to again trigger the keyboard command again. So the breakouts tool can be nicer if I'm going to add multiple tasks in one shot. Now another tool that I like to use is the things three, logbook. So this actually you can see right here it adds every task that I've kind of worked through today. So every task been resolved and things three and obsidian, it actually shows up in my obsidian daily note, which is this allows me to have a daily note with a good representation of everything I did that day, which is one reason I add a lot of my tasks even if they're fairly quick from my full-time job and then I have a full log if they're like, Hey, what's due that day, I can now say, look at and say, well, I did this, this, this, this, and this that day and I actually went through it. And I can give them a good itemized list of the things I did if they ever questioned me on it. You can see it gives me a link to the GitHub issues. It gives me a link back to the things three task in fact right here. So I can open up that task immediately or that project immediately. I can do lots of stuff with that. And they even gave me say the area right. So under business It can see I resolve the bright mode task because I dealt with that. I can use is the things link obsidian plug-in. This allows me to create a task for credit project based on a note. So one place I'd use this is to open up my things to recombine board. And I would actually use this to create a project with link back to the compound bored very easily. Now unfortunately, if I look here, if I type things, you can see I don't have an action for creative project. The first thing you need to do is say Markdown and toggle it to Markdown mode. Now, I can open it and I can say things and I can create a project. And it has created a project into my things database. So if I come back to things, you can see you have this cake stay organized the things three, and I have a link to it, and I've actually already created this right here, things three-course and it has the same link right there. So I don't need this project at the time. So I'm just going to delete it. But now I can add all the different tasks, can have a reference back to it. Now one thing I wanted to make sure I do is I want to delete this bi-directional link because this is going to be a Kanban board. So I'm going to take that right out and not even have it in there. And I can say open as Kanban toggled to incumbent and mark down I'm back to my Kanban board without having the link in there because we kind of just disrupt the workflow that I have. Now if I wanted to get back to this comment board real quick, just open up another note for demonstration purposes. I can come back over to my things, do projects. I'm looking in here, I'm gonna jump directly to that note because obsidian does not open in it right now I can click on this link and it opens up directly to my compound board and I can see where I'm at for the day. Like I said, there's many other integrations with things. Three, if you want them, just need to look around and find the tools that you use, what the integrations are. We've, we're talking about drafts, we talked about shortcuts. I say there's an e-mail, one with Spark. There's lots of integrations that they're free to use. 16. Issues with Things 3: Now while I love things three, it's Donald daisies and Rosa. There are some issues I have with it. I think reminder for you or max or big for you, it depends on exactly your workflow. One of them is the fact that I can't resolve upcoming tasks very well, especially upcoming like repeating tasks. So if I look at my Friday view, I have my member newsletter happen to finish that today because I had time because it's a holiday and I just wrote it because I was inspired. I can't actually do anything with it. Clicking on it, nothing resolves. Wish I could resolve future repeating tasks can just have it repeat again next Friday, which is normally are writing time. Even if I've done early, don't have to worry about it on Friday, even if I've written those, have to come back up and resolve it again, needless busywork. Second big thing as attachments. Sometimes you just need Natasha. I want to take a photo of something, say that I need for my bike and I don't know the exact name of it. I don't know the exact whatever revenue to take a photo of. A couple of the parts of it, a couple of the numbers on it so I can go to the bike shop and then order it properly. I can't do that. I'm going to take the photo than write them down myself by hand. And then if I need to reference the photo again, when I get to the shop, I need to go back to the photo in a separate spot is not really a good way to link back and forth between them. I wish things had attachments, understanding why they don't because of sync, but I would pay some money to have linked attachments in sync. I pay money every month to get sink that had attachments. Another one, location-based tasks are hack. Faculty have to use shortcuts is just a heck. I wish we had locations with tasks, with lists, with everything that I went to hardware. Hardware actually had a location associated with it. And I can actually just bring up the whole hardware tag. When I got to the location for a hardware store, male the thing There's another one. I wish we could just do more with it. I wish that you could with mail things you could actually use like say, a hashtag to get tags. You could use some note to get projects. You could actually do more to file your task directly from an e-mail if you know where it needs to go, if you know the proper syntax would be nice to able to have that. There is actually already some facilities to do that. If you look at the Alfred workflow for things three, you can go to it right now. You see in there Alfred workflow, I can actually add a title, tags, projects, names, notes, due dates. So there's some facility to parse some of this data in things three, it just hasn't made it over to their email feature. And it's been a long time. This is where it is for a long time. Finally, shortcuts. I just wish there was something better than URL schemes for most people because I can read them, but even I have an error or sometimes you got to find some random space that's in there. Some issue with it in some spot. For most people like I would never expect my wife to be able to set that up. I've never expect most people who are not developers and don't understand URL parameters, set that up. So I wish we had more shortcuts. So we had parameters actually in shortcuts. We've had these since iPad, since iOS 15, since last year, has been more than a year and things three has not done any development on that front to enhance their shortcuts though we have more in their more functionality without resorting to URL schemes. 17. You're Done: Thanks for taking my course on things three should now have a good handle on what you can do with things through. You've seen some of my workflow is you've seen some advanced stuff with shortcuts. You should be able to take things three to the next level and really dive into it as your task manager. Again, as I've said a few times in this lesson, the biggest thing I love about it is it's light touch on things that are overdue. Other tools like omni focus, even to do as other ones are really in your face when something's overdue. And I think it creates a lot of pressure. And because most times things don't matter. If you enjoyed this course, I have other courses on Skillshare. Feel free to take them. I'd love to see your hands on. Practice of productivity is a good one for you or have some stuff on note-taking if you like that. You can also check out my YouTube channel which continues to produce content for productivity, for just taking good notes, good research, stuff like that. Have an awesome day.