> I read and re-read your post. I find
> your system impressive but very confusing
> to me.

Maybe I made things sound more complicated than they had to be by
giving too many details. Basically, whether I'm doing a GTD review or
I'm making plans for a particular project (which are two different
things, though similar), I'm switching back and forth fairly rapidly
among a lot of notes, maybe just three or four or five, maybe as many
as a couple dozen, as I think of things to jot down.

If you saw me working at this, you'd see me focused mostly on one note
at a time, but frequently skipping to another note as I thought of a
to-do item, or an idea to think about later, or an issue I need to be
sure is cleared up by a certain time, or something I need to remember
to speak with someone about. Then I skip back to whatever note I'm
mostly focused on.

The part I'm having trouble getting to work to my satisfaction is the
archival part. I want to be able to put away my completed notes for a
project, and yet be able to easily bring them up again as a group at
some point in the future, maybe three months later, maybe two years
later. But in the meantime I don't need to have them on the top level
of my collections. I want to get them out of sight, without making
them hard to bring up again.

If I could put those folders into a superfolder, I could bring up a
set of old project notes with two clicks, one on the "Completed
projects" superfolder and one on the specific subfolder. And filing
away a set of notes once a project is completed would be as easy as
dragging the folder into the superfolder. I can't think of anything I
can do with tags that isn't *more* work than this, not less.

Somebody wrote that they didn't need hierarchy so much as just one
higher level of collection in order to gather collections and tag
collections into groups. That's my case exactly. I just want ONE
folder that I can gather my less needed collections into so that my
list stays short.

(The reason David Allen recommends a simple A-to-Z filing system as
part of the GTD method, it seems to me, is less about ease of
retrieval and more about ease of filing. If you're in the middle of a
productively heated bout of planning and you have to give every item
even twenty or thirty seconds of thought and preparation before you
can file it, you'll start putting things in a "To be filed" pile, so
as not to break your flow of thought, instead of filing each item
immediately. The point isn't to put thought into your filing system so
that you can find things again easily; the point is to make the filing
effortless so you'll do it for each item right away the very moment
you generate it, and if that means that when you're retrieving it you
have to look in a couple of wrong places first because you can't
remember whether you filed something under "Banana cream pie" or
"Desserts" or "Recipes", big deal, it's nowhere near as big a drain on
your system as it is to let a "To be filed" stack pile up. The fact
is, whether you use tags liberally or not, the fear that you're going
to lose a file forever is 99% illusion. The only way you're really
likely to lose a file forever is if there's a software glitch or a
hardware failure that destroys the file; if you stay backed up, the
worst that's likely to happen is that it may take you three or four
tries to find your file instead of one.)

S

--
------------------------------------------------------------------
This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to
the mailing list <yojimbo-talk@barebones.com>.
To unsubscribe, send mail to: <yojimbo-talk-off@barebones.com>
List archives: <http://www.listsearch.com/yojimbotalk.lasso>
Have a feature request, or not sure if the software's working
correctly? Please send mail to: <support@barebones.com>