When to Use Tags, Projects, or Areas of Responsibility

Tags, Projects, and Areas are all features of Things that you can use to organize your data. Sometimes it is not easy to decide which one to choose. This introduction will help you get started.

Tags

In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to think about tags. Consider the following to-do:

 Fix basin in guest bathroom

It's more or less obvious that you need to be at home to do this. However, in order to work with computers, we need to make this information explicit. You could tag this to-do “Home” or “Chore”. If you've never actually attempted plumbing before, it is probably going to take some time, so you might also add “Challenge”.

Let's say you are at home, and you have the weekend free. You could filter a (possibly) very long list of to-dos by “Home” and “Challenge” to reveal only those items that are most appropriate.

Summary: Tags can be used to make qualities of to-dos explicit, allowing you to filter long lists according to whatever qualities are relevant to you at a particular time.

Tags are especially useful when used across multiple applications. Often called “keywords” in other applications (such as iPhoto), tags can be used to associate particular items from other applications to those in Things. Consider the following to-do:

 Plant a garden

This is a task that is pretty self-explanatory. However, using the same tags or keywords across your different applications would allow you to associate photos or other items with the task in Things.

Perhaps you visited another garden where you shot some photographs, or scanned some pictures from a magazine you liked. Use tags for the task such as “garden”, “inspiration”, “flowers”, or “vegetables” in Things and on the photographs in iPhoto. Just reference the existence of the photographs (so you don’t forget about them) along with any other details for the task in the task notes.

When you’re ready to start the project a simple search for the tags (keywords) in iPhoto will bring forth just those pictures you’ve chosen as ideas for this project.

Summary: Use tags and keywords in any application that supports them to help group tasks, ideas, and documents together across multiple applications.

Projects

Typically a Project is associated with something you'd like to achieve as a result of completing the project—the desired outcome. A Project can be thought of as a complex task that cannot be completed in a single step.

Some important aspects of Projects are:

• Typically, the order of items is relevant.
• A Project can be completed.
• Completed Projects will be moved to the Logbook by Things' automatic cleanup.
• Completed items “within” a Project are not automatically cleaned.
• Projects cannot contain items from the Someday and Scheduled lists.

It's okay to have many small Projects.

You can drag and drop the to-dos listed under a Project to change the order in which they appear. This ensures that Things automatically places the appropriate to-dos in Next. Note that you can adjust the number of tasks that appear in Next. (Managing Your Levels of Commitment)

Currently, Projects are realized as flat list of to-dos. We will eventually add more structure here.

Areas of Responsibility

With an Area of Responsibility (or simply “Area”), you don't ask yourself about the desired outcome, but what standards you would like to maintain. An Area corresponds to an ongoing activity. These could be, for example, job responsibilities, roles you have taken on in your family, or personal responsibilities like health. Properties of areas are:

• An Area cannot be completed.
• An Area can contain a mixture of Projects and to-dos.
• Completed items in areas will be moved to the Logbook.
• Items in areas can also appear in Someday and Scheduled.