Things alternative with more visual progress

Things 3 is one of the most beautifully designed pieces of software in any category. It has won the Apple Design Award twice. Its typography is exact. Its animations are liquid. The act of completing a task is genuinely pleasant.

This article is not about whether Things 3 is good. It plainly is.

This article is about a specific kind of user — the one who loves the design, the one-time purchase, the calm Apple-native feel, but who has started to want more visible progress than a checklist can give. A user for whom the missing thing in Things is not a feature, but a way of representing accomplishment.

If that describes you, read on. If it does not, Things 3 is one of the safest task managers you can pick, and you should keep using it.

What Things 3 genuinely earns

A few things Things 3 does that almost no competitor matches.

Pacing. Animations in Things are slower than in most apps. This sounds like a small thing. It is not. The pacing communicates that you are in a careful place, not a fast one. The brain calms slightly when an app refuses to rush.

Hierarchy. Areas, Projects, Headings, To-Dos. Four levels. That is the whole structure. Most users find this fits how they think about their work — small enough to memorise, large enough to organise everything.

Quick Entry. Cmd-Space anywhere in macOS, type your task, hit return. The capture surface is as fast as Todoist's and noticeably more elegant.

One-time purchase. No subscription. You buy it once per platform (about $80 for the full set) and own it.

Apple-native polish. It feels like an app Apple itself shipped. Handoff works. Apple Watch works. Siri works.

There is a reason long-time Things users defend the app fiercely. It is one of the cleanest, most coherent pieces of personal software available.

Why visual progress is the one thing Things doesn't try to do

Things' design philosophy is deliberately list-first. Areas are containers. Projects are lists with headings. To-Dos are checkboxes. The interface shows you what is outstanding. Completed items go to a "Logbook" tab, which most users visit once a quarter, if ever.

This is not a flaw. It is a choice. Things' designers built a tool around the capture and act loop. They did it brilliantly. They did not build it around the see what you have built loop, because that was not the job they took.

The Rivva team summarises the situation honestly: Things 3 is "deliberately simple, resolutely manual, and intentionally focused on solo use." It "provides an elegant, manual task management system for individuals in the Apple ecosystem. It does this brilliantly. But it's deliberately simple."¹

The cost of this choice, for some users, is that over time the relationship with the app becomes one-directional. You capture, you act, you tick, you forget. The visible state of the app is the not-yet-done. The done part lives in an archive you do not visit.

If you have been using Things for two years, the Logbook contains a quiet record of impressive effort. You do not see it. The app does not show it to you. The story of what you have built is filed away.

When that limitation matters and when it doesn't

For some users, the limitation never matters. They live happily in Things' present-tense view, ticking things off as they come.

For others, it matters in specific ways:

At the end of a long project. You finish a big chunk of work and the app shows you the next chunk. The completed chunk is filed. There is no visible artefact of accomplishment.
After a difficult stretch. You come back to the app after a few weeks of struggle and it shows you the backlog. You do not see the things you did manage to finish during the struggle.
During a year-end review. You try to remember what you actually built this year. The Logbook is a flat chronological list with no visual texture. Looking at it is like reading a transcript of your year.
For motivation between projects. You finish a small thing. You tick it. You wait for the next thing. The completion does not accumulate visually anywhere.

These moments add up. They are not Things' fault — the app is doing what it was designed to do — but they may be what you have started to want changed.

What "visual progress beyond a checklist" might mean

Visual progress is a class of designs, not a single feature. The variations are different ways of representing accumulated effort so that the user can see it.

Some patterns:

A growing garden, where each completed Seed or focused session adds something small to a visual landscape. This is the Oasa pattern. The garden grows over time. It does not shrink.
A journal that fills. Some journaling apps (Day One, for instance) accumulate pages you can scroll back through. The visible mass of pages is itself the progress.
A stack of finished projects. Some indie apps render completed projects as visual cards or polaroid-style images that pile up over months.
A calendar of completed work. Some tools, instead of showing only the future calendar, show a heat-map of what got done in the past. The visible density is the record.
A tree, an island, a small character that develops. Forest is the canonical example.² The tree growing during a focus session is the visible artefact.

None of these are better than a checklist for the capture job. They are designed for the seeing job. A tool with both is rare; most tools pick one. Things 3 explicitly picked the checklist side.

If what you want is the seeing-side complement to Things — without losing what you like about Things — you are looking at either two tools used together (Things + a journaling app, say) or a different tool that does both.

A short note on Oasa's Zen Garden

Oasa is the second kind of answer. It tries to do both jobs in one tool.

The capture and prioritisation logic is small but real: Oases, Seeds, Sprouts, and three Oasis types (Simple, 80/20, Hyperfocus). It is not as deep as Things 3 — there are fewer levels of hierarchy, fewer sorting affordances, no Cmd-Space quick entry from outside the app (yet).

The visible-progress layer is what Things does not have. Completed work shapes a Zen Garden that grows in seven stages, from a patch of soil to a flourishing place. The Garden does not shrink when you do not Tend it. There is no metric, no level, no streak. It is a record of what you have built.

If the design pacing of Things appeals to you and you have started to want more visible accumulation, the Zen Garden page is the calmest illustration of what we offer.

Honestly: if you love Things, you may keep loving Things. Oasa is not better at being Things. We are trying to be something next to it.

Key takeaways

Things 3 is one of the most beautifully designed task managers ever made. It is deliberately a checklist.
The limitation that some users hit is the absence of a visible record of accumulated effort. Completed work goes to a Logbook that most users do not visit.
Visual progress is a class of designs: growing gardens, journals that fill, stacks of finished projects, heat-maps of past work, growing trees.
The choice is not Things-vs-something. The choice is whether you want a tool that does both capture and seeing, or whether you want to keep Things for capture and add a separate seeing-side tool.