When I open my area of focus "A" folder, should I have projects in there or reference material or both?
One of the problems with folders is that it’s not easy to put something in two places. If you put your projects into AOF folders, what happens when you have a project that applies to more than one AOF? In Windows you can use shortcuts, and on Mac you can use aliases, to make it appear like one thing is in multiple places but it doesn’t always work that well. So you should only really use folders to structure things when stuff divides pretty cleanly into them. Getting that right can involve a fair bit of fiddling
All that said, personally I do put both projects and reference material under AOF.
The same problem exists with reference/support (nonactionable) material. But generally, if I have a piece of nonactionable stuff that relates to just one project, I put it in that project’s folder. If I have a piece of nonactionable stuff that relates to a whole AOF I put it in the AOF folder under "ref" to make sure it doesn’t look like a project. And then I have folders for general "ideas", "records", and "knowledge" broken down into topics. This might seem pretty heavy-weight to other people on this forum but I’ve found I have a personal need for pretty precise categorization. It’s just an example of how far you can go.
How do I phrase a goal so it is not a project or responsibility, and are goals above aofs or under?
Depends on the goal. Goal is just another word for something you want to achieve. A goal could be cooking dinner in the next 50 minutes. If, by goals, you meant major life goals then those are probably above focus areas. To some extent, they might define your focus areas. Or, if they don’t yet, they may in the future.
Responsibilities are something different: these aren’t things you want to achieve but things you need to watch to see if they have any projects or next actions attached, then those become things you want to achieve.
Does gtd encourage ideas to go into someday/maybe, or their own list? Or reference?
Really depends on the idea. An idea is just input. You need to decide what you want to do about the idea. Maybe you just want to hold that idea some where and add a whole load of other ideas to it so you can compare them against one another and decide which you like and which you don’t. Then you can formulate some projects and next actions from that brainstorm.
Example, i thought of a nice color scheme for a room.
You have to decide what the next action is there. Do you love the idea? Do you want to talk to someone else about it, to see if they like the idea? Do you want to park it and to see if there are better ideas? Maybe it’s brilliant and you’re going to go down the store right now and get the paints.
An idea should never go on an action list. It’s input, not a clarified action.
Off of that, does anyone else leave reference items in a context list to act like a location based ticker? Eg, i am at computer and i see a note in @computer that says keyboard shortcuts for a new program. I would have forgotten to use them if they were in reference.
You might want to think of the keyboard shortcuts not so much as reference material, which you would go out of your way to find, but as a checklist for computer best practice. If you think of it that way then I’ve got the same problem as you:
http://www.davidco.com/forum/showthread.php?12846-Triggers-to-look-at-checklists I think using a context list as a place to trigger checklist material is probably a pretty good idea. I know David Allen says to come up with “tricks” for this stuff so I think anything that works is probably permitted. Just make sure you don’t go numb to it. That might mean limiting the number of keyboard shortcuts on there to 5 or so. Just the ones you don’t already use.
