This morning I was looking at my To Do list and wondering how I could organise it. I had “to do’s” that were finished and marked as closed that I wanted to retain because they recorded the date that I’d done that task. If I deleted the To Do I wouldn’t easily be able to say, “yes, I did that last week” or whenever I did it.
I knew I could start a new collection and move the notes out of one folder into another but that seemed like a lot of handling for such a simple activity. Also, switching off to the finder or the terminal to do all of this seemed to disrupt my workflow and concentration. For a while I wondered about duplicated Status in as tags, or just tagging and using the Tags pane but that also seemed like double-handling.
I remembered this discussion about using Notenik to manage multiple projects and wondered if it would help me in this situation. The purpose of this use of folders is that the parent folder gets to see everything in all sub-folders but each sub-folder is an island. It occurred to me that I could use the fact that sub-folders are siloed from each other.
I decided to add a Folder field to my collection. I edited my closed notes, adding them to a folder called “Archive”. The pending tasks were added to a folder called “Active.” This separation allows me to have the active collection uncluttered. To move them, I switch to the parent collection and assign the note to the Archive folder, which is fairly fast and seamless.