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This is a part of my ongoing series on The Hit List. To read the first post, click here, and to read them all at once as they were meant to be read, here.

There are two types of true containers in THL, and several other pseudo-containers. The difference is that items actually reside in containers, and are just shown in pseudo-containers. Think of containers like folders in the file system, and pseudo-containers like smart folders. Note that these terms aren’t actually used in THL to the best of my knowledge, I just made them up to allow you to better understand their uses.

The first kind of real container is a simple List. Lists contain tasks. These are ordered sequentially, and can be rearranged. (You can also choose to arrange lists by other criteria, which will be addressed later, but they remember their manual sort order when you return to that view.)

Folders, which are the next container, can only contain lists and smart folders (which we will address next), as well as other folders. They are used to organize your lists. I’ll get into what all these can be used for later. Additionally, if you view a folder you have an option to choose how many tasks from the lists it contains. It does not show the tasks in the smart folders, which is a design choice I believe the developer may be rethinking, or those in lists inside subfolders, which I’m pretty sure is a bug.

Smart Folders are a lot like lists, except for their behavior in folders, but cannot be sorted manually. They contain tasks automatically selected based on criteria you define. Because you can add sub-rules, smart folders can become quite complex. Criteria include every property of a task, including its list/folder, sub-task number, and created/modified dates.

Tags and Contexts–At the top of the sidebar, next to the text “Lists”, are a pair of icons. The folder shows your lists, and the tag icon shows your (what else?) tags.

Now seems as good a time as any to describe tags to a fuller extent. They are designed to be used to narrow down the list of tasks you can work on at any given moment. If you are at work, and use THL for more than just your work tasks, you can use the Filter bar (again covered later) to narrow down the list of tasks you see to only ones tagged with /Work, for example. If the creative juices are flowing, you can narrow down to /Writing tasks, or /Blogging ones. Unfortunately, you can’t do both of the latter on the fly, as the Filter bar shows tasks with both tags if more than one is selected. You can create a temporary smart folder though.

Contexts are, as has been explained before, tags that denote what you need to have in order to do the task, like @Mac, @Phone, or @Errands. You can narrow down your list of tasks by what contexts you are in at that moment. If you frequently are either at work, home, or the library, you can set up Smart Folders for places you frequent and then view them when you are ready to Do. You can also just view all the tasks in @Errands if you’re planning a large shopping trip.

Tag structure can again be as complex as you make it. The three types in this pane are tags, contexts, and bundles.

Because tags are sorted alphanumerically, contexts naturally come to the top, unless you use other symbols preceding your tags. Their icon is a light pink color, to match their highlighting color, and tags’ are yellow.

Bundles are a new concept, unless they’re present in OmniFocus. They are the equivalent of folders for your tags. You can add tags and contexts to a bundle, but not assign it to a task. It can, however, be a criterion in a smart folder. Bundles can be used for organizing different types of tags, such as those for activities and those for areas of responsibility. I wish bundles could be assigned to tags, because in Things I had a tag for @Mac, with subtags for @Internet, @Blogging, @Scripting, and so forth. Then I could simply filter by @Mac in the filter bar and see all of them, or just see some. This may come in a future release, but I’m not holding my breath.

Special Containers

THL comes with some containers you can’t delete. These are nicely split up into containers and pseudo-containers by their headings.

The Inbox, under the heading Inbox, is the default list for every new task added either by the Quick Entry panel, dragging to the THL dock icon, or using the item THL puts in the Application > Services menu. (Quick tip: Using this and the Services Menu Module, you can add tasks to THL from Quicksilver, even if THL is closed.) Again, this is a List, so it is a container. This is also where tasks go if their list is deleted.

Under the Hit Lists heading, there are two pseudo-containers. The Today view is where you go when you are ready to Do.

This is split up into about six or seven categories, and organized in the order THL thinks you should complete them. First off are your overdue tasks, which shouldn’t be so hard to figure out. Then are tasks that have the due date of Today. After this I remember a section for Due in the Next 3 Days, but this issue (I think of it as an issue because that’s not the way I work) may have been changed in one of the two recent updates. Still Working On refers to tasks added to Today, either by moving them to the list or their start date passing, before today, that don’t fall into an above category. Start Today tasks have been added to the list today or have a start date of today, and the rest categorizes the tasks you have completed. If you’re astute you will notice that the task under “Completed today” is merely marked as completed, while the one under “Completed yesterday” has been archived. Of course, if there are no tasks to fit a category it disappears.

Upcoming looks like Today, but displays different categories.

Tasks with a start date in the future are shown in the Upcoming list. The increments are Tomorrow, Next 3 days, Next 7 days, possibly Next 14 days, Next 30 days, and so on.