Learn how to quickly send new to-dos to Things on your Mac with an app launcher like Alfred or LaunchBar.

You can also use our own tool, Quick Entry, to add to-dos to Things from anywhere on our Mac.

Create to-dos with Alfred

In order to add workflows to Alfred, you’ll first need to buy the Alfred Powerpack. This workflow requires Alfred 3 or later.

To send a new to-do to the Inbox—or directly to an existing project or area—use the + keyword. A title is required and the other parameters are optional. Here’s the complete syntax:

+ title #tag1 #tag2 [project name/area name] ::note >duedate

Download Alfred Workflow

Create to-dos with LaunchBar

You can send to-dos to Things via the Add to Things command that’s included with LaunchBar.

Support for other Launchers

In order for your favorite launcher app to send to-dos to Things, it must support running AppleScript. Here’s the AppleScript that it needs to run:

tell application "Things3.app"
parse quicksilver input q
end tell

q is the string for Things to parse. Things understands the following syntax when parsing text from a launcher:

title #tag1 #tag2 [project name/area name] ::note >duedate