Do the work

The lists you act from are the smart lists. Projects is where you think about outcomes. Inbox is where you catch things. During the day you mostly live in Today and in one context.

A simple day

  1. Open Today. Do or reschedule anything overdue, and anything dated for today. Rescheduling means choosing a new honest date, or removing the date if it was never a deadline.
  2. Glance at Scheduled if you have deadlines this week you could start early. You are looking, not reorganising.
  3. Open the context you are actually in.
    • On the sofa with your phone: Anywhere
    • In the house with a chore that needs the house: Home
    • Leaving the house: Out
    • About to phone people: Calls
  4. Do one action. Tick the subtask, or the Next reminder. If the project outcome is now true, tick the project too.

That is the whole engage step. The other contexts can wait. Their job is to be complete when you arrive there, not to be reviewed every morning.

Choosing inside a long list

If Anywhere has more than you can hold in your head, use these levers before you invent new tags:

  • Flag up to three actions for today and work from Flagged.
  • Sort the smart list by due date, priority, or title from the more button, if a sort makes the next choice obvious.
  • Do the one you are most willing to start. Momentum beats a perfect ranking.

A context list that runs past a couple of screens is a signal for the weekly review: some of those subtasks are probably later steps, and belong back in the project notes until they are real.

When you finish an action

  1. Tick the subtask.
  2. If the project is done, tick the parent.
  3. If the project is still open, add the next subtask now if you know it, and tag it. If you do not know it, write “decide next step” as an anywhere subtask, or leave a line in the notes and catch it at the review. A project with no current subtask is invisible on the context lists, so the review treats that as a fault to fix.

When you are interrupted

Capture into Inbox in one phrase. Go back to the action you were doing, or consciously pick a new one from the context list. The interruption becomes a decision later, during clarify.

When a person is the constraint

  • You need to place a call or start a video chat: tag call, and work from Calls.
  • You will already be messaging them: turn on When Messaging on that reminder. Edit the reminder, tap the i info button, turn on When Messaging, and choose the contact. The next time you open that conversation, Reminders can surface it. Leave the context tag as whatever the action still is, or use waiting if you cannot move until they respond.
  • You have handed it over: retag the subtask to waiting, title it “Name: what you are waiting for”, and look at the Waiting smart list in the review.

Dates during the day

A context smart list includes dated actions before the date arrives. That is useful for “due Friday, I could do it now” and noisy for “I do not want to see this until Friday”.

If seeing it early is a problem, it is not a current action yet. Remove the subtask and keep the step in the project notes, with the date written in the line. Put a separate dated reminder in Next only when you want Today to ping you to promote that step. Title it so the promotion is obvious: “Add next step on kitchen tap”. Tag that reminder anywhere if you want it on the Anywhere list as well as Today.

Putting the phone down

Clear flags you no longer mean, or leave them if tomorrow should start there. Empty Inbox if it is a short one. Anything bigger waits for clarify or for the weekly review. You do not need to re-tag the system every evening.