YouReallyDoNotHaveUnlimitedEnergy
Things 3 is the only app I’ve ever actually reorganized my entire day around — not because I wanted to, but because I *had* to. You ever try to follow someone’s blog post about how they organize hundreds of tasks across multiple projects, and then 3 hours later you’re lying on the floor staring at a mind map wondering how your life got like this? Yeah.
After burning myself out on Airtable, Notion, and five Todoist setups that all looked pretty but turned into guilt museums, I finally caved to Things 3. It felt light. I liked how it didn’t nag. But then I had a weird realization: the app was structured to let you hide things *until you need them.* And that’s not the same thing as never doing them. Which meant… if I was having a low energy day, the app wouldn’t tell me what was *still possible*… just what was *next*.
So I started tagging everything not by project, but by energy. High-energy, medium-energy, low-energy. I even had a tag called “Addled” for when I had brain fog and was basically a hamster.
Surprisingly, this didn’t screw up the flow, because Things 3’s tag system filters fairly quietly. You don’t need to folderize everything. Once I added those tags, I could look at just low-energy tasks in the Today view, or even filter the whole Upcoming to spot things I could shuffle around when I was clearly not delivering CEO vibes that morning 😛
HowToSetUpEnergyTagsWithoutBreakingAnything
First, open Things 3. Yeah, I know, obvious. It’s probably sitting right beside your unread Slack messages.
Go to the Tags area — it’s in the sidebar. Use the + button to create a new tag. Now, here’s the trick: if you want to make energy tags really helpful (and not mess up your existing categories), make them a nested group. So:
– Energy
– High
– Medium
– Low
– Addled (optional, but you’ll need it sooner than you think ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
This way, you can search, filter, and collapse them all into one group when you don’t care. Add a color to each sub-tag if you’re that kind of person — I found red for high, yellow for medium, gray for low made sense. Addled is blue because on those days time feels like water.
Now when you’re adding or editing tasks, just tag the energy level you *think* you’ll need. If you’re really fried, just tag it as all three. I do that sometimes when I’m not sure if a particular email will take 2 minutes or destroy my soul.
FilteringTasksWhenYouAreBasicallySoup
On days where I feel like a startup founder after demo day (read: crushed internally by pressure I made up), I rely *entirely* on filtering.
Hit the search field at the top of Things 3. It’s sneaky powerful. Type the tag. Let’s say `low`, or `addled`. Suddenly, the whole interface dims and breathes. You’re now only seeing things your current brain might actually pull off.
What I messed up early on: I kept adding tasks with no energy tag, thinking “I’ll decide later.” I never did. I now use a shortcut (a manually-triggered Automation, ironically) that nudges me to assign a tag when creating a new task. No tag? It drops into a “Sort Me” area I review at night during my “be a human again” session.
You can also use a tag filter when inside the “Today” list or the “Everything” perspective you built even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t make custom setups this time. Just open one of those lists, swipe down, hit the search icon, and filter by `#low` or whatever your tag is.
Bonus: combine context. If you’re errand-running but tired, you can do something like `#low #errands` to find only slow-tasks you can do while shuffling around a Target.
UsingWhenToTweakFutureTasksByEnergy
Here’s where it gets weird. Not all tasks match your current energy — and you can’t always predict the *future* energy you’ll have.
I started looking ahead in my Upcoming and realized Friday mornings were mostly fake productivity. I was just watching YouTube and pretending to plan. So, every Thursday night during my normal Things review — 10 minutes max — I’d skim the calendar and drag any high-energy work *away* from Friday AM. I’d drag in low-energy grooming tasks instead. Tweaking the “When” with energy tags in mind made Fridays feel gentler *without* skipping responsibility.
Don’t be afraid to adjust tasks based on time-of-day energy patterns. I can’t write well in the afternoon. If I spot a writing task there, I’ll either:
– reschedule it for the following morning,
– or retag it as “Medium” so I don’t over-commit.
There’s no shame in shifting. Things doesn’t punish you for moving tasks around — which is 90% why I trust it. Unlike productivity gurus who scream about commitment.
TroubleshootingWhenTagsDisappearRandomly
Okay so this one actually drove me nuts for a while. Sometimes, I’d type a tag into the search and… nothing. Blank. Or worse — it would show just one task, even though I *knew* I had six labeled that way.
It turns out: Things 3 sometimes caches tags weirdly, especially if you edit them inside Quick Entry or sync across devices rapidly. It’s not a bug that throws errors — it just… forgets to register a change.
Fix? Two things:
1. Go into Tags, manually expand each tag group, and make sure nothing’s buried or untagged.
2. Run a periodic search for `no:tag` (or scroll through your Inbox with a watchful eye). Anything missing gets reviewed.
Also — don’t mess with tag names too often. I renamed “Low” to “Zzz” once (don’t ask), and every filter I had broke silently 🙁 — no warning, no error, just nothing showing up. I had to redo a week’s worth of mental muscle memory because of a stupid renaming impulse.
WeeklyReviewShouldCheckEnergySpread
Once I got this system working, the biggest improvement came from my Sunday ritual.
Instead of asking “What do I need to do next week?”, I started asking:
“Does this week have a healthy spread of energy levels in it?”
I open the Upcoming view, scroll through the week, and tally roughly how many High, Medium, and Low entries are scattered across each day. If a day looks like all-red (High), I pause. That’s not gonna work. I’ll shuffle some stuff around, swap a few With lists, or split something into subtasks that hit different energy marks.
Later I noticed something even weirder: just seeing low-energy tasks *scheduled* felt like permission to take breaks without guilt. It’s like your calendar is saying, “Hey, you got stuff done today — even if none of it was loud.”
SometimesYouNeedABrainFogBuffer
There are legit days where I wake up and the only thing I trust myself to do is… sort logins (low). Or reset my router (addled). So I built what I call a brain fog buffer.
It’s just a Things Area called “Buffer” with a bunch of low-effort tasks I can pull in when my brain isn’t doing nouns correctly anymore. Think:
– Delete old cloud files
– Clean headphones
– Resync email client settings
– Rename screenshots instead of leaving them as Screenshot 2024… forever
Adding tasks to the buffer feels good, even if I don’t end up doing them that day. And pulling them in baselines my brain like, “Hey, you’re still useful. Just in a quiet way.” 🙂