In the process of learning to use OmniFocus to Get Things Done, I have changed the way I group projects into folders. I started by grouping projects by purpose. I later realized why OmniFocus doesn’t have task priority: it has project priority built in, just by moving projects around in the Projects view.

This made me think that I should throw away most of my task due dates, which I’ve done, and replace “which task to do next” with “what are the next actions in my projects”. This encourages me to prioritize projects, rather than simply dump them into the Projects view and, perhaps, collect them by related purpose. Now, I group projects by “urgency”, which I happen to measure in how happy they make me: do they take care of me? do they generate more passive income? do they help me spend more time with cool people?

Incidentally, notice that I wanted to hide some of the information in the “urgency” picture, but not in the “purpose” picture. That’s a clue in itself about what I should really be working on: the stuff I don’t want you to know about until I release it. :)

So if you have found that your projects list has grown out of control, maybe you should re-prioritize your projects and group them by urgency, rather than purpose. You could even hide the “not important, not urgent” projects and look at them only during a periodic review.