The beautifully designed task manager Things 3 takes to-do lists to the next level, letting you slice and dice your action items in a number of ways. One of our favourites: it lets you quickly create a checklist within a to-do – so you can break complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps.

For example, if your to-do is “Repair dishwasher”, you might embed a checklist with “Look for dishwasher serial number”, “Find the phone number for repair company” and “Get sales receipt from file cabinet”.

Or if you need to contact various colleagues about a particular project, you might add a checklist with the name of each person directly in your to-do item, then mark them off after you’ve had a chance to chat.

Creating a checklist is easy. Just open a to-do item and click the checklist button at the lower-right. Or use the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-C.

Here’s another tip: copy a bulleted list from elsewhere, like a web page or document. When you paste it into a Things 3 checklist, the app will automatically format each bullet as a separate item.

Things 3

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