Archiving of projects is indeed on our roadmap, the Focus/Live state makes less sense in our opinion, an alternative would simply to create a “Focus” Category instead. Given categories are sorted alphabetically you could name it “1. Focus” or " Focus" and bring your most important projects to the top that way. Down the line we plan to add support for manually arranging the order of items in the sidebar, so you would not need the naming trick anymore.
The problem with the idea of the Focus Category is that my Projects already live in categories like Client A, Client B. If I move them into a Focus Category they loose the relationship with the Client.
The ability for Projects to be in more than one Category would allow the method to work though.
Another approach might be possible if Projects could be tagged. I could then tag some #focus and save an overview.
I don’t think we’ll go there, the added complexity doesn’t weigh up to the benefits in our opinion. In the end of the day the note is the central unit. I can understand that some notes in a project for client A and B are very much on your Agenda, but it’s rare that all notes are relevant (even say those from a year ago), and as said, if they are you would probably want to put them in a special category/categories near the top of your sidebar.
Also, one alternative approach is to add a special tag in the notes (e.g. #hot or #focus) that are very actual and create an overview for those, which conveniently will still be grouped by category and project (i.e. first client A, then B).