8 Months with TickTick: Why I Left Things 3 and Haven't Looked Back

8 Months with TickTick: Why I Left Things 3 and Haven't Looked Back

I used Things 3 for years and years, but eventually got sick of the lack of basic functionality. The main things that pushed me to look for something new where the lack of media in the notes of a tasks and the lack of Kanban. When I went searching for a better solution, I came across Ticktick and it checked all the boxes I was looking for.

Now I’ve used Ticktick 8 months, I want to break down what I love and what I dont love in detail.

What I love

Nested tasks

I never thought I needed this, and I wasn’t looking for this when I was searching for a new task manager… and it turns out that I love it.

I can basically put tasks inside of tasks inside of tasks forever, and I use that to better organize complicated projects.

I first saw this functionality in the productivity app Godspeed, but I didnt fully test it out, and now I wish I had.

One example of using this is that within my “Techlife” area I have tasks like “HomeAutomation”, and then within that I have tasks like “Washing Machine Shake detection”, or “Auto kitchen fan when stove turns on”.

Filters ( not tags)

Next is filters. I had originally started using tags, but I didnt like the UI for adding tags to tasks. Filters allow you to just use an emoji at the beginning of your task, and then it will show up in that filtered list. It makes that type of task very visible in a longer list of tasks, so it’s faster to find them.

My use cases are things like projects, up next, in progress, logs. Project in particular really broke my Things 3 implementation. I needed a way to separate a task that was something I could complete in a single action, vs projects that contained many many subtasks.

This makes navigation to these different views super fast, and I like it even more than tags in Things 3.

Rich text notes and media in tasks

This was the thing that caused me to move from Things 3. When I do a task, there is often a lot of information I want access to that is related to the task. The easiest way to capture that information is usually a screenshot or a photo from my iPhone…

Which is why it made my so furious that I could never add images to tasks in Things 3.

Ticktick does a great job here. It’s fast, it works exactly how it should.

It also lets you set the image size (though I’d like to see more than small / large)

Kanban view

I use this functionality for very specific projects. The first is my YouTube content production workflow.

I have a section where I save all my ideas for future videos, and as I work them through my production process I move them through the different lists in the kanban view.

The other use case is my storage unit inventory, and I wrote about how to use a task manager to organize your things in storage units here.

What I hate

While I’ve been really really happy with Ticktick so far, it’s definitely not perfect. Here’s some of the things that have been causing me friction. In all fairness, some of these things are picky.

Even better rich text handling of media

While ticktick does let you indent and out dent really quickly with its rich text editor, this doesn’t spill into image formatting. I like to indent and outdent images if I’m storing a lot of visual information in one place, and TickTick doesn’t allow for that.

Similar to the above, i like to store a lot of visual information with my tasks, and a lot of useful information comes from YouTube. Sure I can paste a link and an image of a screenshot of a video, but it’s not nearly as fast as just embedding the video directly.

Better keyboard shortcuts

TickTick is pretty fast, but from the keyboard, you can’t navigate into a list and use arrows to go up and down the list of tasks. I’d like to see TickTick go more in the direction of Godspeed, where you can do all navigation straight from the keyboard.

The other example is that I’d love to set and change due dates using only the keyboard in Mac. I feel like setting a date is one of the slowest parts of creating a task, so I’d like to see a keyboard only option.

Last but not least, sometimes my tasks related to files and folders on my local Mac drives. I’d like to be able to link directly to those from TickTick. That way I can click and i go straight to opening that file or folder. this is particularly helpful for media management tasks, when I’m doing video editing.

What I’ve seen in other apps is:

Format: file:/// + full POSIX path

Example: If your file is at /Users/yourname/Documents/My File.docx, the URL would be file:///Users/yourname/Documents/My%20File.docx.

TickTick does let you attach files to a task, but that doesn’t work great when it's a 30GB video file.

Conclusion

Despite these areas of friction—the lack of deep keyboard navigation, embeddable video, and true file-system linking—TickTick has proven to be a vastly superior tool for my workflow. The core features I needed—rich notes, media handling, and the versatile Kanban and nested task views—easily outweigh the quirks.

TickTick isn't simply a "nicer" to-do app; it is a powerful organizational platform that handles complex projects and visual information in a way that Things 3 simply couldn't. It's the rare app that allows me to quickly capture single tasks while also managing massive, multi-year projects effectively. If you are an Apple-ecosystem user who has hit the ceiling on Things 3's feature set, TickTick is the upgrade you are looking for.