Organizing projects

What problem this solves

On any given week, five projects matter and ninety-five don't. TOM's organizing tools exist to make the five reachable in one tap and the ninety-five findable in three. There are no folders, no categories, and no priority fields on projects — deliberately. One primitive does all of it: the tag.

One primitive: tags

A tag is a free word on a project: client, paused, field, demo-ready. Tags drive the filter bar, the sort options, and pinning. Two kinds appear in the UI:

• Your tags — solid chips. You create and remove them.
• Automatic tags — dashed amber chips like active, hot, cold, frozen, new. Computed from real file activity and project age. You can filter by them but not edit them — they reflect what's true on disk, not what you wish were true.

Tag from anywhere

You never need to open a project to tag it. On any card — list or board — either long-press the card or tap its ⋯ button. The action sheet offers:

Tag… opens a searchable checklist of every tag you've ever used, with per-tag project counts. Tap to toggle, type to filter, and when what you typed doesn't exist yet an Add "…" row creates it. One Save writes the whole set.

Inside a project, the same sheet is behind the + Tag button in the header.

Bulk-select: organize the whole portfolio in one sitting

Tap Select in the Projects header, then tap cards to select them (works in both views). A bar appears with Tag… and Move….

The bulk tag sheet works differently from the single one: each row cycles through three states — untouched → + (add to all selected) → − (remove from all selected). So one pass can add client to eight projects while stripping a stale paused off them.

Pins and Recents: the shortlist

Pin (in the card action sheet) puts a project in the Pinned chip row at the top of home, stars its card, and floats it to the top of the list view. A pin is literally just a tag named pin — filterable like any other, visible from every device.

Recent is automatic: the last few projects you opened, as a chip row below Pinned. Between the two rows, the projects you touch daily are one tap away without any curation.

Inside a project, tap the project title to open the quick switcher — pinned and recent projects first, plus search over everything. Hop between projects without ever returning home.

The filter bar

Under the search box, one scrolling row of tag chips with counts. Tap to filter; tap several to narrow (filters AND together — client + active means both). Selected chips pin to the front of the row. The All tags chip opens the full picker — every tag, searchable, split into your tags and automatic ones.

Filters apply to whichever view is active, list or board. On the board this is the fastest "show me only what's hot" lens: filter hot, and every column collapses to just the moving cards.

The board: situation, not category

The board view is your hand-arranged kanban: columns and named group lanes you define, plus a virtual Unsorted column holding everything you haven't placed (projects never disappear). Drag cards on desktop; on the phone use Move to… in the card action sheet.

On a phone the columns stack vertically — collapse the ones you're not looking at with the chevron in each column header, and use the jump chips at the top to leap to a column. Your collapsed set is remembered.

Gotchas

• Automatic tags shift on their own — a project untouched for a week loses active. If a filter "lost" projects overnight, that's why.
• The board layout is shared state (stored in Mind), so phone and desktop always show the same arrangement. If two devices edit simultaneously, the later save is asked to refresh — nothing is lost, just re-drag.
• Deleting a board column doesn't delete its projects; they fall back to Unsorted.
• Tag matching is case-insensitive — Client and client are the same tag.