§ My Areas of Focus
These are my current Areas of Focus — a Getting Things Done concept. They're the stable organizing principle above all my tools (Todoist, Toggl, Linear, vault).
Areas of Focus
At the highest level, I have 4 overall areas of focus for my life:
Sub-Areas of Focus
These are the Task and Time Tracking categories within these areas of focus. They map to Todoist projects and Toggl categories, but are not first-class wikilinkable notes — they're documentation only.
- 🚀 Buffer
- 🎯 Leadership
- 🪞 Reflection
- 📚 Study
- 📝 Team Notes
- 👥 Management
- 🤝 Team Responsiveness
- 📥 External Comms
- 🙌 Connection
- ⭐ Customers
- 🏢 Area Guidance
- 🛠️ Buffer Tools
- 📋 Buffer Systems
- 🎨 Creator
- 📝 Content Creation
- 💬 Community Building
- ✍🏻 Note Making
- 🛠️ Creator Tools
- 🌳 Digital Garden
- 🪴 Note Taking
- ⚡ Productivity System
- 👨🏻💻 Side Hustle
- 📰 Flow Reader
- 📎 Curated Clippings
- ☕ Creature Comforts
- 🏡 Personal
- 🏠 Housekeeping
- 🛍️ Shopping / Errands
- 💪 Health & Fitness
- 🎹 Play
- 👪 Family
- 🙌 Connection
- ✈️ Travel
- 🖼️ Home
- 🛠️ Home Maintenance
- 🚗 Cars
- 🤑 Wealth
- 💌 Personal Email
Convention
Areas have three representations that must stay in sync:
| Layer | Form | Example | Used by |
|---|---|---|---|
| YAML source of truth | Plain slug | creator |
project_groups.yaml, all Python tooling (tgtd, clinear, joel-mcp) |
| Persistence filenames | Slug in filename | weekly-priorities-creator-2026-05-20.md |
get_agent_state / get_agent_log MCP filters (regex on filename) |
| Vault frontmatter | Wikilink | area: "[[Area - Creator]]" |
Goals, habits, projects, agent state/log files; queried by Bases + Dataview |
The bridge is the slug: field on each area hub note — categories/Area - Creator.md::slug resolves to creator. Emojis are display-only (display_emoji: frontmatter + # 🎨 Creator heading) so tooling can ignore them.
area: null (or omitted) marks intentionally cross-area artifacts (e.g. retro-review-*.md, agent-stack-decision-*.md).
GTD project
I also have a top-level ⚡ GTD project that handles all GTD review rhythms across areas.
Todoist setup
I organize Todoist projects both as nested projects and with the emoji of the Area of Focus included in the project name. This means I can easily see — and programmatically retrieve — projects for an Area of Focus by looking at project names for an emoji. For example, all Personal projects include the 🏡 emoji in their name.
Areas of Focus vs Linear Teams
Areas of Focus are the stable organizing principle across all tools — they rarely change and represent what deserves my attention in life.
Todoist and Toggl map 1:1 to Areas (via emoji-prefixed projects and time tracking categories).
Linear teams are a different concept — they are product and domain boundaries, not Areas of Focus. This is a deliberate mismatch:
| Linear Team | Domain | Spans Areas |
|---|---|---|
| CORE | Scripts, API, MCP, CLI, vault tooling | Creator, Side Hustle |
| CRE | Newsletter, community, content projects | Creator |
| APP | joeldash native/app | Creator, Side Hustle |
| DASH | joeldash web frontend | Creator, Side Hustle |
| GAR | Digital Garden | Creator |
| PROD | Agents, GTD, system design | Creator |
| Buffer workspace (28 teams) | All Buffer work | Buffer |
A Linear project can span Areas (a CORE project might serve both Creator and Side Hustle). And Area work might span multiple teams (Creator area touches CRE, CORE, GAR, DASH, PROD).
The agent layer bridges this gap during reviews — querying Todoist projects by emoji prefix for clean area mapping, and Linear projects by team/assignment for approximate area correlation.
See How Linear fits my productivity system for the full synthesis.
History
In January 2026, I restructured from 5 areas to 4 by eliminating ⚙️ Systems as a standalone area. Systems projects were distributed to the areas they serve (Buffer systems → 🚀 Buffer, Creator systems → 🎨 Creator). This change was made to enable cleaner separation between Buffer and Creator work, allowing dedicated Creator focus time without Buffer-related systems appearing.
In May 2026, the vault representation was unified: 4 area hub notes (categories/Area - X.md), wikilink-based area: frontmatter convention everywhere, deduplication of habit notes, and consolidation of three legacy "Areas of Focus" notes into this hub.