Introducing Tags/Projects 💼

A few days ago an acquaintance described how he does various projects throughout the house and requested to be able to group to-dos together into “projects” so he could more clearly see what to-do needed to be done as part of a particular project.

He helped me realize that a project is a collection of one or more to-dos, some of which may depend upon one another, aimed towards a common goal, usually with an overarching end date. In this way, projects are different from categories, because categories in simpler are designed to be permanent.

While someone might have a category called “Gardening”, a project could be something more specific and time-based such as “Spring Planting”. In this example, “Spring Planting” might be a collection of to-dos such as “Buy seeds”, “Buy garden gloves”, “Plant flowers”, “Plant lettuce”, and so on. The idea here is that the last to-do for this project should be completed by the end of spring. Other types of projects might be work-related, or to do with things you need to get done around the house, for example.

Sometimes it’s nice to just see the to-dos for a particular project when you know you need to work on just that project. simpler’s new “simple project management” feature helps you do just that.

Projects in simpler’s user interface are designed to “get out of the way” — as such, they’re minimally visible, and only if you choose to group your to-dos by projects. For example, the only way to add new projects is while you’re adding a new to-do or editing an existing to-do. That way, you don’t have to even think about projects until they become relevant (such as while adding a new to-do).

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note: projects have now been renamed to tags.