A Matter of Perspective I: Active Projects

Upon moving back to Things for task management, I had investigated the ability to see my to-do's in various views. OmniFocus calls these views Perspectives. Things does not have built-in perspectives.

So, if I wanted to see all of my personal calls to make: how would I do that with a single tap?

What about items to consider for my business partners?

And what about errands that I can run right now?

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Apple Shortcuts to the Rescue

For the answers, I decided to dig as deep as I could with Apple Shortcuts. Where OmniFocus has these Perspectives within the application, Things leverages Apple Shortcuts externally from the app to be able to arrange your to-do's and projects into various views, mostly using other the "Open List" or "Show Items" Shortcuts inputs.

Example: Active Projects

If you read my last post, you'll see that Things has the excellent Quick Find search bar, whereby you can see all of your projects. Well I wanted to take this a step further to only see projects which are active, and can be worked on right now.

Here is how I set this up. You'll use a combination of Things' "Find" actions, as well as Variables.

The shortcut build looks like this, below. I have crudely labeled the 5 steps that it takes to make this view happen for you. The parameters are as follows:

1. Search for the action by typing Things into the search bar, and then select Find Items First, we have to Find Items in Things to work with! They must be:

• Not Logged
• Started Today (more on this below)
• A Project

1. Search for Variable and we will use Set Variable. This will make the set of data in the first step a Variable. This is what we will eventually view. We can add to this variable. You can see that I gave it a name of "1". It literally doesn't matter what you call this, but you will be using it again in step 4, and it has to have exactly the same name, so make it easy on yourself and name it something that you will be able to easily retype.
2. We are essentially going to repeat the first step here, but this time instead of projects started today, we can look for projects that have a start date that is "Anytime", in Things' lingo. That is to say that the entire project is not deferred until later.
3. Search for Variable, but this time choose Add to Variable. In a variation of step 2, we are now going to add to the Variable from step 2.
4. Finally, search Things and you will select Show Items, and the item name is the Variable from above (which I have titled "1").

Here is how to set up showing only active projects in Things using Apple Shortcuts.

The outcome looks like this (sensitive info deleted):

My list of active projects result from the Apple Shortcut above.

See how neat and tidy this is? The possibilities with Things and Apple Shortcuts are nearly endless!

Build Your Own

Try building your own Shortcuts, but first I would advise writing down with pen and paper what you truly need to see versus what you can build. To endlessly fiddle with building Shortcuts can be a time suck, so watch out for that.

Here's to a new perspective.

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