I’ve been reading “Making it work” by David Allen, and I’ve realized that the app usage I described above maps very well with the way he recommends to organize low to mid-level stuff. Apart from the high-level lists (like goals, values, vision, etc), he suggests using three buckets:
- actionable items, that one should do to make progress on projects. this is the famous to-do list, that I use Todoist to track,
- Reference material, that is any kind of file or document that might be useful one day, those I keep into Evernote, and
- Support material: notes, files and reference that are often necessary to consult when progressing on a project. This includes project plans (which are different from a todo list). Those I keep into Agenda, which is particularly well suited to track this kind of things which are neither directly actionable nor archivable.
I’ve found that using three different apps to track the three different categories of things is helpful, as it makes obvious the nature of the things you’re interacting with. If you track all of those in the same app, for each thing you run into you’d need to evaluate each time the level at which the thing is immediately relevant and actionable.
I don’t think I’ve seen this particular distinction made anywhere so far, so I thought I’d share.