Problem: grouping my projects by Area of Concern is visually incomplete as I can pretend they’re assigned to an Area but cannot visually represent them as such; I can only filter them as such.
How this is a problem: As a visual, hierarchical thinker who for example loves outliners because that’s how I work and think, the parent-child relationship between items is gone.
But why is this a problem??? Because I think in groups. I file my files in folders. I use both notebooks and tags in Evernote. I use parent-child relations in TheBrain.
But what does having folders solve for you???* It allows me to order my things the way I like them to, the way a utensil drawer allows me to group my forks and knives together. It allows me to organize.
But how in the world isn’t that solved by tags and labels?!?! Tags and labels tell me what something is but not where it is. They are like labels on Christmas gifts under the tree – but the gifts are still all piled together. For a certain group of people, to which I seem to belong, just labeling what something is isn’t enough; we also want to store it in a group
But then…what’s the use case? To group items together in the way we like to. To group items in the way we think or work. To have our software work the way we work instead of us having to work the way the software works.
But…but… Sssh, I get it. We’re weird people You think differently so you don’t see it. It’s like when I talk with people whose desktop is loaded with files, downloads, icons, etc.
When I tell these people you can use folders to store those things they look at me like I’m crazy; they already have everything here, grouping icons together – why would they use folders?
But can’t you… Yes. Speaking for myself, I can work around this. Especially knowing that work on folders would delay other works. I rather see sync and mobile clients delivered before I see folders. On the other hand, if implementing folders later on is harder then I rather have folders first. But in either case, I can work around it. That’s the thing though; worka around it instead of having it work with me. As you saw, I use fake projects with a separator to emulate folders. That works pretty well to help me approximate the visual grouping I crave.
For now folders, for me, are a “Would be really nice to have”, and I can wait for them but would love to know eventually they’re coming. Would not having folders be a reason to abandon ship? No, not as of yet. I don’t know why but Everdo just clicked with me, your work process and release cycles have instilled a lot of faith and trust in me, and I’ve become a paid user pretty fast. Everdo has more going for it than against it. But let’s say I would find something like Everdo but with folders – I might be tempted, yes.