Things is still my favourite to-do app but Wunderlist is free and it’s Android compatible. Here’s how to export your to-do items from Things to Wunderlist.
To get all your todo items from Things into Wunderlist you need to export your Things items as a text file then import that text file into Wunderlist using the Wunderlist parser tool.
- Select your first Area of Responsibility in Things. (e.g. ‘home’)
- Select the top to-do item in that area, then shift click on the bottom to-do item. Now all the to-do items will be selected. They turn blue to show they are selected.
- Drag all the selected to-do items to the desktop. Things will make a note on the desktop with all the items in it.
- Open this note, then press Apple-A to select all of the note. Press Apple-C to copy all the text.
- Go to http://wunderlist-parser.herokuapp.com/parser
- Login with your Wunderlist details. Under ‘Items’ click and then press Apple-V to paste all the to-do items items in there. Under ‘List Title’ type in the name of the area of responsibility (e.g. ‘home’)
- Click on ‘Create List’ at the bottom of the window and all the items will be imported into Wunderlist.
The Wunderlist parser tool imports each line in a text file as a seperate to-do item.
I’m a passionate Things user thinking of switching to android and Wunderlist. Do you have any suggestions as to the best way to make Wunderlist as close to a Things experience?
Everything becomes a folder. No projects. No areas of responsibility. No locations. No focus. Just a whole lot of folders that replace all those categories. Much simpler!
So for example I have as folders: church@7, church@11, DPC, staff/session, web, wpcc, wpcyc, kids ministry, church camp, home, office admin, shopping, waiting, reminders.
They are roughly ordered with areas of responsibility at the top, followed by projects, followed by locations and areas of focus. I had one called ‘holidays’ for holiday planning which just got deleted when we got back from holidays.
I tend to put my more important folders towards the top. So if I had a very important project that was current I would stick that folder right at the top (even though it is a project not an area of responsibility) so that it would be the first thing I see when I look at my ‘All’ list which is the view that I tend to live in.
Stars work the same.
Hi Wayne,
Thank you for this website and Mac resource. Grateful for the info ! Related to the above thread, I was curious if you or anyone had similar advice / steps to export all my items from Things … to get them into ToDoist ? Thanks in advance for any help you could offer.