Moving from Apple Reminders or Things to a WIP-limited system.

Reminders and Things are, at heart, collectors. Infinite capture, clean organization, lists and areas and tags — everything you need to hold tasks beautifully, and nothing that stops you from holding too many. They'll happily let you carry four hundred open items across a dozen lists, because from their point of view that's a feature. Switching to a WIP-limited system isn't trading one collector for a nicer collector. It's trading a collector for a cutter.

Put the apps side by side on features and it's a wash or a loss: Things has gorgeous design and a decade of refinement; Reminders is free and built into every Apple device. If you're comparing checkboxes, stay where you are.

The difference that matters doesn't show up on a feature list. It's a single constraint the collectors refuse to impose and a WIP-limited system builds around: a cap on how much can be active at once. Everything follows from that one idea —

• Work-in-progress limits — a small number of things in flight, so the rest waits in the backlog instead of pretending to be "current." (The mechanism, and why it works, is here.)
• Effort sizing, not scheduling — tasks sized S/M/L by effort instead of scattered across due dates you'll snooze.
• Aging that's visible — stale tasks surface instead of hiding quietly in a list, so you can cut them.
• A weekly review that prunes — a scheduled moment to kill tasks, not just reorganize them.

Reminders and Things can store tasks under any system you impose by willpower. A WIP-limited app makes the system the default, so you don't have to supply the discipline every single day. That's the whole point of the agile-for-one method: the survivors of team agile, built in so you don't have to reinvent them.

You keep the things you like: fast capture, projects to sort work into, a list and a board view, sync across your devices. What changes is the posture. Instead of an ever-open inbox you occasionally take from, you get a small active set, a backlog that's honest about not being "now," and a weekly habit that cuts. You'll capture just as freely — you'll just stop mistaking capture for progress.

The honest objection to any switch is the switching cost — you have tasks in Reminders or Things already, and nobody wants to retype them. This is the friction that keeps people in a system they've outgrown. So handle it directly:

1. Export what's live, not everything. You do not need to migrate four hundred tasks. Most of them are exactly the dead weight the new system is meant to cut. Bring over what's genuinely active — realistically a few dozen items — and let the rest stay behind. The migration is your first cut.
2. Import the survivors. Move the live tasks in, sized S/M/L as you go. (Zoro's import is built for precisely this step — bring your active list from Reminders or Things without retyping it.)
3. Set your WIP cap on day one. Pick a small active number. Everything else starts in the backlog. Resist the urge to mark everything "active" out of habit — that's the old collector talking.
4. Run one weekly review in week one. Even with a fresh, small list, do the review. It sets the rhythm, and it's the muscle the collectors never asked you to build.

The reframe that makes the switch worth it: you're not learning a new app. You're adopting a system your old app was never going to give you — and bringing only what survives the move.