It is confusing because let's say I've created a Project called Work and I have to daily report on metrics for my site. I'm assuming my next action is to email colleagues requesting their portion of data I need. So I have a label called email and next action is to gather data. So my question is under Next Actions there is going to be various next actions that are tied to projects in the projects folder?
I can't help responding, though, yes, this will all be clearer when you read the book, so my responding is probably premature.
"Work" would be well above the Project level--it would be an Area of Focus, or even higher than that. So we can ignore the "Work" layer for this discussion.
If you were to have a project for each daily report, that might look like:
Project: Get Monday's daily report done
Next Action: Mail Joe, Fred, and Wilbur for data for Monday's report.
However, if I were doing this, it would look more like:
Project: Establish routine for completing daily data report.
Next Action: Create mailing list for data request.
And then you might have a series of Next Actions like setting up a meeting with the people who provide the data to discuss the best way to get it, maybe automating the data submissions, and so on, until you have done all the setting up that you need in order to be able to do that daily report reliably. Then that project is complete, and can be closed.
If you can't fully automate the daily report, then you might have a project for it with repeating actions, or you might have a checklist for doing the daily report, and an action in some project that manages all of your repeating actions. So that might look like:
Project: Keep data reporting going.
Next Action: Complete Daily Data Report checklist
And that Next Action would repeat every day. It's also possible that the daily report would become so habitual that it doesn't even need to appear in your lists. It just occurred to me that there's an activity that I perform near the end of every workday, that takes from half an hour to an hour and a half, and it hasn't been in any list for me for over a year, because it's so habitual that it doesn't need to be. If I were writing up my job duties for a replacement, it would need to be there, but otherwise, nope.
I think of my Next Actions as being "under" their associated projects, even if I sometimes view my lists in a way that shows me all Next Actions for all projects at once, or shows me all Next Actions for a given context at once. (A Next Action will be associated to a project AND associated to a context.) Some people don't tie Next Actions to Projects quite as tightly.