Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time. Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories.

Imagine how absurd it would be to organize a kitchen instead by kind of food: fresh fruit, dried fruit, fruit juice, and frozen fruit would all be stored in the same place, just because they all happen to be made of fruit. Yet this is exactly the way most people organize their files and notes—keeping all their book notes together just because they