How to Export and Migrate from Things 3

TL;DR: Things 3 has no export menu, but your data sits in a readable local database on your Mac. The quickest way out is Done Bear’s importer: install the CLI, run donebear import things on the Mac where Things lives, and your areas, projects and tasks land in your workspace, with Today, Someday and scheduled dates intact.

Years of accumulated projects are the reason people stay on a task manager they’ve outgrown. Not the app. This is the honest version of what moving out of Things 3 costs you.

First: your Things data is not locked in

Things 3 famously has no export menu. What it has instead is a well-understood local SQLite database on your Mac, inside the Things container in ~/Library/Group Containers. Every task, project, area, tag, note and date you’ve typed is in there, readable by tools already on your machine.

That gives you three realistic ways out.

Option 1: Done Bear’s one-command importer (recommended)

Done Bear ships a Things 3 importer in its CLI, built on that database. On the Mac where Things is installed:

npm install -g donebear
donebear auth login
donebear import things --dry-run
donebear import things

Your areas become your project structure, and your projects come across with their tasks and notes. View placement survives too: Today stays Today, Someday stays Someday, Anytime stays available. Start dates and deadlines map to Done Bear’s Upcoming view, and completion history goes to the Logbook, so finished work isn’t erased.

The importer is idempotent and read-only against Things. It never writes to your Things database, so you can run it, live in Done Bear with your real data, and keep using Things while you make up your mind. Flags, dry runs and re-imports are in the import documentation.

Option 2: copy-paste for small setups

Underrated if you’re a light user: Things lets you select multiple to-dos and copy them as plain text, one task per line. Keep that list beside Done Bear and retype what still matters. Under a hundred active tasks and no attachment to dates or the Logbook, and ten minutes of retyping beats any tooling.

You lose schedules, notes formatting, completion history and your area structure.

Option 3: fresh start with a Someday amnesty

Some people shouldn’t migrate at all. If your Things database is mostly archaeological, hundreds of Someday items you haven’t opened in a year, capture only what your head still knows is active and declare bankruptcy on the rest. GTD’s founder would call that a weekly review several years overdue.

There’s a middle path. Run the importer, then spend one session in the Someday view deleting freely. Turns out deleting in a new app is emotionally cheaper than deleting in the old one.

After the move: a one-week checklist

1. Triage, don’t reorganise. Rebuilding your structure on day one is the trap, so run the minimal five-view setup for a week first.
2. Set up capture everywhere Things couldn’t go: the web at work, the Windows app if that’s your world, the Raycast extension on macOS.
3. Try the parts Things never had. Share a project with a partner or a teammate, or connect an AI assistant through the MCP server and let it file follow-ups onto your list.
4. Keep Things installed for a month. The importer didn’t touch it, so it’s a free safety net until the new system has earned some trust.

Why people make this move

Almost nobody leaves because they dislike Things. They leave because of the walls: no teams, no Windows version, no web app, no API.

Done Bear keeps the calm five-view GTD workflow and drops the walls, with local-first sync so it stays as fast as the app you’re leaving. There’s the full Things 3 comparison, or you can start free. The import takes about a minute, and your Things data stays exactly where it was.