Quote Originally Posted by CSicking View Post
If anyone else has examples for defining Areas of Focus that worked for them, I'd love to see/hear.
I suspect that mine would make little sense - all those sewing and gardening and perfume projects, and my work stuff is in another system. So I took the easy way out and made an example of how I'd design your system.

One philosophy that I have about organization: If a category isn't too big to manage yet, it doesn't need organizing. For example, if I owned only ten books, I wouldn't bother to organize them into murder mysteries, technical, cooking, etc. I wouldn't organize them at all; I can scan ten titles. If I had forty books, I might make one division and divide them into Fiction and Nonfiction or Work and Pleasure or whatever broke them up nicely. If I had two hundred books, I'd find a couple more categories.

But I feel that every level of organization _costs_, rather than adding value, so I don't organize until I need to.

If I had the projects that you've described but my method of using GTD, my folder structure would look something like:

= Meta (Folder)
== Goals (SAL (Single-Action List))
== GTD (SAL)
== Project Seeds (SAL)

= Work (Folder)
== Singles (SAL)
== Current Projects (Folder)
=== Prepare test team for Widget database (Project)
=== Prepare test plan for Widget database (Project)
== Someday/Maybe Projects (Folder)
== Agendas (Folder)
=== Agenda - Project A (SAL)
=== Agenda - Project B (SAL)
=== Agenda - Boss (SAL)

= Home (Folder)
== Singles (SAL)
== Projects (Folder)
=== Get living room painted (Project)
=== Start vegetable garden (Project)
=== Buy new TV (Project)
== Someday/Maybe Projects (Folder)

= Personal (Folder)
== Singles (SAL)
== Projects (Folder)
=== Create a "Hello, world" standalone executable in C# (Project)
=== Hold a beer tasting (Project)
=== Read a book on photography (Project)
== Someday/Maybe Projects (Folder)
=== Take a course of at least four guitar lessons when the weather gets colder.
=== Decide if I want to go to Home Brewer's Convention.

= Support Material (Folder)
== Recipes (SAL)
== Stuff to Read (SAL)
== Bug Reports (SAL)

Explanations:

- You can see my fondness for flatness. That Widget database stuff could be buried in a structure like:
= Work
== Programming
=== Oregon division
==== Widget Project
===== Programming
===== Testing

but does that add any value? In my view, it doesn't. Similarly, the "learn C#" goal exists in only two places - it will be present up in the "Goals" SAL, and represented by the one "hello world" project in Personal. All of the other ideas and steps and thoughts would be up in "project seeds" until you're ready for an actionable project.

- The "agenda" folders in my system are the places where I put thoughts about a specific project or person that I don't want to forget, but that I'm not ready to convert into a project, and that may no be big enough to be a project. I only show them in Work because I only have them for Work, but you might well have them in all three major areas. Edited to add: So how are these different from Project Seeds? Good question. I try to make Agenda items actionable, while Project Seeds can be any old thing. I suppose that Agenda items are really "singles" for a specific project.

- Singles would contain repeaters and single actions. Repeaters are things like Balance Checkbook, Pay Mortgage, Have Chimney Cleaned, Write Status Report, Check Bug Tracking System, and so on. They would have appropriate start dates so they only pop up when you need to see them. Single actions are, well, single actions, things that don't need a project. Return Joe's call, buy walking socks, that sort of thing.

- The GTD SAL would be GTD maintenance tasks. It would be things like a a weekly, "Do weekly review" task, a monthly "Consider adding a new project from Goals".

- Project Seeds would be a place to put ideas for projects that you're not going to start right away. Each project would get one line, which would have an On Hold context. Any detailed thoughts would be in a note rather than broken out into any subtasks. I have Project Seeds up in Meta (that is, the area where I store stuff related to all areas of the system) but if I piled up too many ideas, I might put a Project Seeds list in Home and Work and Personal, or I might even end up with top-level folders of Meta, Home, Work, Personal, and Project Seeds.

I realize that this is probably far, far too flat for your comfort, but I wanted to give an example of what a flat system would look like. Edited to add: And I should add that it's not strict GTD; I'm sure I'm violating the rules of the system.