Projects, sections and labels

Three grouping tools that are easy to confuse. The short version: a project is where a task lives, a section is a heading inside it, and a label cuts across everything.

	A task can have	Use it for
Project	Exactly one	The body of work it belongs to
Section	One, inside its project	A stage or theme within that project
Label	As many as you like	Anything that spans projects

Inbox

Every task with no project sits in Inbox. That is deliberate: capture should never make you choose a project first, because the decision is what stops people capturing at all.

Treat Inbox as a tray rather than a home. Emptying it every few days — filing what matters, deleting what does not — is most of what “staying organised” amounts to here.

Projects

A project is a container for related work: Website redesign, Home, Q3 audit. Give each one a colour, and the colour follows its tasks everywhere else, so a task in Today tells you what it belongs to without saying so in words.

Favourite pins a project to the top of the sidebar. Useful once you have more than about eight.
Archive hides a finished project without losing it. Better than deleting for anything you may want to look back at.
Drag projects in the sidebar to reorder them.

Deleting a project does not delete the tasks inside it. They leave the sidebar with the project, but they still exist and still turn up in Today, Upcoming, searches and filters. If you meant to get rid of the work too, delete the tasks first.

A good project is one you can finish, or one that names an ongoing area of your life. If you find yourself creating a project for a single task, it wanted a label.

Sections

Sections are headings inside one project — Backlog, This sprint, Blocked. They order the work within a project, and they become the columns when you switch that project to Board layout.

Collapse one to get it out of the way; it stays collapsed next time.
Deleting a section keeps its tasks. They stay in the project and simply become uncategorised, so a tidy-up can never lose work.

Labels

A label is the tool for anything that refuses to sit in one project. @errands, @waiting, @10min, @calls — these describe a task’s nature, not its subject, and the same label turns up across half your projects.

Labels belong to the workspace and each name is unique within it, so everyone sees the same set and nobody ends up with a near-duplicate. Add one by typing @name in Quick Add, or from the task detail panel.

The ones that earn their keep

Context — where or how you can do it: @errands, @computer, @calls.
Effort — @10min is worth more than it looks. It answers “I have a gap before the next meeting” instantly.
State — @waiting for anything parked on someone else’s reply, so it stops looking like your inaction.

Deleting a label removes it from every task at once, and unlike a project or a task, that one is not recoverable. Rename instead when you can.

Choosing between them

When you cannot decide, ask what you would want to see together in one list. If the answer is “everything to do with the website”, that is a project. If it is “everything I can do while out of the house”, that is a label. If it is “everything in this project that is not started yet”, that is a section.

And if the grouping only matters occasionally, it may not need any of the three — a saved filter can answer the question without adding structure you have to maintain.