Inbox, Projects, and Areas of Focus

Hi everyone. I’m new here as well. The purpose of my post is to ask questions about everyone’s usage in 3 specific areas: Inbox, Projects & Areas of Focus.

Background: Like everyone else who is here, I’ve been in search of “that perfect” GTD web client and native iPhone/iPod Touch app. Formerly, I had plunked down $25 for RTM (regrettably), and paid a couple dollars for Toodledo to experiment. Neither really did it for me. NirvanaHQ is a nice slick interface, but they’re in beta and so they have some issues. Someone had recommended Smartytask, which looks cool, but also they just opened their doors. I feel like I’m dating GTD apps!

What lead me to Nozbe?
Evernote. It’s that easy. Notwithstanding some concerns I have (addressed below), the integration with Evernote is killer to me. I love that I can just call my project something in Evernote and BAM it shows up in Nozbe. So, I plunked down some money for the Pro account and the iPhone/iPod Touch app so that I can see how it works … and like so many others on these boards, I have some questions.

So what are my specific question?
1. Inbox – I don’t want to belabor the point since its been made countless times everywhere in these forums, BUT, what if we just created an .ACTION project and processed all our tasks that were not Next Actions, but were deferred actions? I just tried it and wonder how it will work. I agree with everyone though (and Michael doesn’t disagree), an Inbox is not a project as defined by GTD standards. But, would that resolve the argument?

2. Areas of Focus – I have 3: Work, Home & Blog. I can’t figure out how to manage my AOF in Nozbe. My one thought was to redo the entire projects section and create 4: Work, Home, Blog & .ACTION as noted above. Then, I thought of using the tags (labels) to name my projects. Alternatively, I could use my AOF in each of projects. Anyone have any ideas?

3. Projects – One thing Nozbe is forcing me to do because of the Inbox situation, which I really like, is creating projects. The downside to this is that I have a lot more projects than I thought and I’m not quite sure how its being sorted. I know you can move them around, but

• what is the default sort;
• can you/are there plans to hide some of the projects so that not everything is in view?; and
• once you’re in a project, why can’t you filter like you can with Next Actions? In other words, if I wanted to tackle a project,
• why not be able to filter by context within the project itself so that I know what I want to spend my time on?

There’s other little nuances (like checked off tasks not going away until the next day – I like clean & clear “mind like water” for everything), but like I noted above – I’m willing to pay the price for Evernote integration!

I appreciate everyone’s replies!
Daniel