The bit that makes triage work
Triage is only ever as good as what you’ve told it about. Five minutes here is the difference between notes landing where you expect and landing anywhere.
Everything else in Edmund is designed so you don’t have to think. This is the one screen where thinking pays off, and it pays off every single day afterwards.
A project is a bucket
A project is wherever a note eventually belongs. That might be an actual project (“Edmund”, “Kitchen extension”), or it might just be a part of your life that collects things (“Admin”, “Band”). Edmund doesn’t care which. When you capture a thought, triage reads it and picks the project it thinks it belongs to, and that guess is the single most useful thing the app does for you.
Two or three is plenty to start. You can add more the moment you notice notes piling up somewhere they don’t fit.
The description is the important field
Here’s the bit that surprises people. Triage doesn’t read your project names so much as your project descriptions, and a good description is worth more than any amount of fiddling afterwards.
Compare these. “Work stuff” tells Edmund nothing at all. “Client work for the studio: bookings, invoices, chasing masters, anything involving Sarah or Dave” tells it what belongs there, in your words, including the names it should watch for. The second one will catch a note that says “chase Sarah for the invoice” without you lifting a finger. The first one won’t.
So write them like you’re describing the project to someone who’s covering for you next week. Nouns, names, the kinds of things that land there. Stuck on it? Tap Help me write this on the project form and answer four questions, and Edmund drafts one for you to edit.
Areas group projects
Once you’ve got more than a handful of projects, the list gets long, and this is what areas are for. An area is a name and a colour, nothing more: Work, Personal, Band. Projects sit inside one, and every picker in the app groups by area, so choosing between fourteen projects becomes choosing between three areas and then a project.
Make one from the menu on the Home screen with New area, then assign projects to it from each project’s own Area field. Nothing is required to have an area. Notes in a project without one simply read “No area”, which is fine and quite common early on.
Worth being clear on what areas are not: they’re not a second filing decision. Triage picks a project, and the area comes along with it, because the project already sits in one. You’ll never be asked to choose an area for a note.
How many is too many
The failure mode isn’t too few projects, it’s too many overlapping ones. If two projects could both plausibly hold the same note, triage has to guess between them, and so do you when it guesses wrong. Merge them and you’ve made the app better at its job.
The other one to watch: a project so broad it swallows everything. If a project called “Work” is catching four fifths of your notes, it isn’t filing anything, it’s just a second inbox.
Changing your mind later
All of it is editable, and none of it is destructive. Rename a project, rewrite its description, move it to a different area, and your existing notes stay exactly where they are. A better description only affects what gets filed from that point on, which is the right way round: Edmund never quietly reshuffles notes you’ve already dealt with.
And if triage puts something in the wrong place, just change it on the note. Edmund remembers corrections and uses them as examples next time, so the fixing tails off fairly quickly.
Next: what triage actually does with all this, or back to Help.