How to Group Items by an "Area" AND a Time Frame

LauraH

I created these some time ago and had them in the old Slack discussions. Thought it might be helpful to others to share them here also.

How to group things by “Area” / “Life Vocation” AND Time Frame. (Two Possible Ways)

In one online community I’m part of, I’ve been introducing a few folks to Moo.do. I’ve done a couple zoom calls with them to show how I use it; and also regularly answer questions on the forum. One person recently asked me how to have things grouped by “Area” or “Life Vocation” and also by Time Frame. So, I created two quick screencasts showing two possible ways to do this.
Sharing here also in case they are helpful.

Using Mirrors:
Using Tags:

** NOTE: I used the tags for the “Areas” and the outline for “Time Frame” in this example, but the same method would work if you used tags for “Time Frame” and kept the outline for the life areas.

How to choose which tag schema works best for you?
I find that the “outline” is the most basic / native aspect of Moo. So, when organizing info, I try to think about what view of the information I am going to want MOST; and make that the outline view. Then use tags to create “secondary” categorization.

Jerud

Just wanted to let you know I’m using this @LauraH ! Thank you for posting it clearly.

I’m doing (yet another) “system overhaul” and while I arrived at the above seemingly on my own, I’m sure I read it here first and then it bubbled back up. I’m using outline for Area and tags for Location (which roughly equates to Timeframe for me). I finally realized that what I needed was to organize the same items by two (or more) parallel schemes, which is exactly what you’re describing here. I just hadn’t thought of it that way before.

I have come to regard the different ways to organize info in Legend on a continuum of complexity:

Outlines are “native” as you say and (fittingly) highest-complexity because they are multi-tiered and infinite.
#Tags (and unindented outlines) are next because they are natively single-tiered yet infinite (#tags can be massaged into multi-tier but less intuitively).
+Tags are more firmly single-tier and practically finite (though with effort you can both tier them and use an ‘infinite’ number).
Dates (all types; scheduled, synced, completed, modified, etc.) are single-tier and infinite
Item types (prefixes) are single-tier with 6 states.
Priorities are also single-tier with 4 states.
Complete and star are simply binary states.

Each – or all, if you can handle the overload – of these can be applied to every item in a document, completely in parallel and independent of each other. That’s….a lot of organization!

I frankly get swamped by this. What I’m trying, to help me cope, (for task-oriented workflows) is to follow this rule: Build boards which organize items (by applying properties) incrementally, working from high to low complexity pane-by-pane until I arrive at the “output” state (usually a flat list). Obviously skipping rungs in the ladder is okay (and almost certainly better) but the jist is to go high-to-low.

I suppose, if you were building content, notes, or other content, this would go in reverse since the end product is the highest-complexity state. Seems like that would require a ‘start’ and ‘end’ document…hmmm…

So far the main liability is a heavy reliance on group-by panes, which can sometimes get squirrely or just plain confusing…but it’s methodical and I like that.