Who uses Realms and Areas, and how?

[David Szego (Cardo)]

Hi all,

As I get Cardo closer to release, I'm now considering what to do with Realms and Areas.

Personally, I never had a use for this - either in my paper-based GTD routines, or in dGSD. I always found Contexts was enough.

I did try using Realms such as "Home, Work" and areas within Realms such as "Home --> Garage, Basement, Chores; Work --> Admin, Reports, etc." This is one possible use.

Tim Rayworth posted, in late 2015:

"I use "Areas" as literal areas, as in off-site locations, which works really well for reviewing projects and contacts associated with each area. I have given my contacts Area tags, and I display the contacts in an Area's tiddler with a dGSDList that filters contacts with the area title."

He followed up in a discussion last month saying:

Areas are natural clusters that projects fall into. ... Sometimes I'll use an area to define an initiative like "training" or something where there will be many projects with common goals. ...

So for work projects the realm is "work" and the area is whatever label I give the work unit that the project is for. ...

At home I don't really have anything like that, so all projects generally are in the realm "home" with no areas. 

... I find areas easy to use for categorization, ... It's nice to be able to filter out home projects when at work and vice versa...

Alfonso adds that:

"I recommend sticking with one or two realms at the most (i.e. "work" and "home") as each realm is a completely separate space..."

Other than that, there's literally no discussion on the topics of "realm" or "area" when you search TW-GTD!

I'm proposing the following, and would like your feedback and use cases:

Realms are larger groupings of areas. Use them for what you will such as locations (Work, Home, School), or mega-topics (Family, Business, Clients, Hobbies).

Areas are the subtopics within each Realm. For instance, "Home" could have "Chores, Repairs, Garage". "Work" could have "Web Projects, Admin, Reports".

Now - this is really only important when you're showing a Dashboard. But how do you choose a Realm, and then show all the Areas, and then choose the Area, and assign the task, then switch back, etc.?

What I think I'd like to do, and I'll try this for the next beta, is combine them into a grouped-list select dropdown, which sets a global variable:

All
Work
    Admin
    Reports
    Development
Home
    Garage
    Basement
    Chores
Family
    Kids
    Money & Taxes
    Retirement

Then any dashboard shown will only show tasks/projects/meetings/etc. tagged with that variable.

Tag a Tiddler with "Realm", it becomes a grouping (bold). Tag with a Realm name, it becomes an Area. Click on a bold grouping (Realm), it'll show anything in any Area in that group.

If I put this in the Cardo sidebar, above the sub-tabs, it will be easily available.

Your thoughts?

[Alfonso Arciniega]

David,

Although I recommended having only two realms at the most, actually I do not have a use for realms. Instead of having separate realms (e.g. one for work and one for home), my preferred way is to have two completely separate files. This separation works for me, as I am able to customize each one the way I like it (areas and contexts are different), besides avoiding distractions and focus on one set of projects/tasks at a time.

Alfonso

[Florian Alber]

Hi David and Alfonso,

since this week I switched from the normal GTD5 to your Cardio Wiki, because it's far better for project management and to coordinate a small team. For me its necessary to work with realms, because I work on two different projects and use also a private realm. I was very happy to see your addition with the Area possibility, because it gives me the possibility to divide my project in different departments, for example electrical engineering and business.

The only thing which I struggle with now is, that if I create new people, I add them to a Realm or a department, for example Max to department electrical engineering in project/realm A. But if I work on project B and I create a new task from someone in this project, I don't want to see Max in the realm of project B. Or if I see him, it would be perfect to divide the people also into realms and areas. That means if I search someone to whom I assign a task, I see not only a list of names, but a structure where project A, B and C are the main divider and also in the projects the people get divided by areas, for example Max in electrical engineering.

Overall to answer your main question in this thread, I like it to have one wiki for everything, so I can look in to that, and can see what I need to do. Therefore I like the possibility to divide my wiki into realms like work and private life, so if I have a lot to do with my work, I can focus on that and if there isn't much to do, I can focus at all tasks and things I need to do. It gives the possibility to focus on specific field in my dashboard, because when I'm at work, I don't want to see the tasks I've to do at home.

Therefore I'm very happy that you have created Cardo Wiki, because its really the wiki I was looking for. I hope you can help me with my question or I can help you to work out a solution for this problem.

Greetings,
Florian

[David Szego (Cardo)]

Hi Florian, thank you for your very kind words - I'm glad Cardo is helping you!

If I understand you right, you want a *full* separation, to the point that People in the Realm "Home" won't be shown in the dropdown of Tasks (Assignee/Requestor), Meetings (Attendee), or Projects (Team Members) in the Realm "Work".

It's do-able - just one more filter to add to the <$list> that creates the select dropdown... The problem I see is that you might have people who in fact do need to be in both Realms -- yourself, for instance!

I'm working on one last bug that's simiar: I've filtered out "Complete" items from select dropdowns. What I found is that if I associate a Reference to a Project, but then I mark that project "Complete", the Reference loses it's association... It's still there in the field, but because the completed project isn't shown in the select dropdown, it looks like the Reference isn't associated to anything.

One solution may be to sort the select dropdowns like this:

Current Projects:

Project #1
Project #2

Completed Projects:

Project #3
Project #4

or similarly for assigning people to tasks:

In Same Realm:

John Doe
Joe Blow

In Other Realms:

Jane Doe
Mary Brown

...which at least gives you some visual cues.

Your thoughts?

[Florian Alber]

Hi David,

no, I would only need a sorted dropdown list like you've described. Like you said, it could be possible that some people interact between the realms, therefore it's far better to solve it with a realm sorted list.

I think this would be a long term solution for this problem, so you don't have to search through the whole list for a person. I will give it a try to extend my dropdown list to a sorted list.
It could also be interesting, to divide people not by realm, but by company or institute, but this should be possible by changing the attribute for which people get sorted.

Greetings,
Florian

[David Szego (Cardo)]

Done. Will release tomorrow night!

Cheers,
David.

[Ivan Aparicio]

I use realms as roles that I take on - Father, Designer, Hobbyist etc. All of the projects that I do fall under one of those roles, and their direction is focused towards me progressing in the roles.

I'm trying to move from GSD5 to Cardo, and I notice that to filter the dashboard, where we used to have realms, there is now 'Focus', which seems to list the 'Areas' that have been defined. I can't see where I can edit the areas (I can add one, but I can't delete the already existing ones). Are they tiddlers? If so, I can't find them through the search bar.

Cardo looks really great and functional, but I'm getting the impression that it may have too many features for my application, which is personal weekly planning and project management. Is support for GSD5 being dropped?

Thanks,

[Maarten de Ruiter]

I was going to use them but as newbie carodo user it was quite confusing to see realms and areas in the same arena list. I've solved it for now by putting a * in front of the area name.
So my list looks like:

Work
* Admin
* Reports
* Development

BTW anyone knows the offcial way to remove the "web development" area? I don't do any web devs

[Stratos Laspas]

I use realms as in Work, Home, Personal

I use areas as in Work ==> Business Development, Professional Skills, Marketing, Accounting, etc

Projects go within areas

[Stratos Laspas]

David, for me, in order for Areas to be useful, I would need a "review" tiddler same as "Tasks by Context", but customized for "Areas". How can I do that?

[David Szego (Cardo)]

Just open the "Tasks by Context" in the Review sidebar, and change the Focus dropdown to whatever area you'd like to limit it to!

[adamh...@adamhouston.com]

I tried getting rid of Web Development also and wasn't able to do it via deleting tiddlers as it looks like it is hard coded in the Cardo plugin.  So I, er, uh, just modified that to get rid of it.  It will probably come back when I update the plugin but that isn't a big deal.

[adamh...@adamhouston.com]

I think that is an excellent idea.  I like to group specific project into containers (like in your Work area you have an ERP project to contain all of the actual specific ERP projects containing tasks).  Using projects as just containers is messy so I like your concept of the combined, grouped Reams+Areas.  This would work similar to how Thomas Leonard set it up to work in the GTD tool he was building CueKeeper ( http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2015/04/28/cuekeeper-gitting-things-done-in-the-browser/ ).

I also really liked how he explained something in his blog entry

Unlike projects, areas generally cannot be completed. One thing that confused me when I started with GTD was that what my organisation called “projects” were actually areas. If your boss says “You’re working on project X until further notice” then “X” is probably an “area” in GTD terms.

CueKeeper lets you nest areas under other areas and I really like the organization this affords.