GTD, Projects, and Next Actions in org-mode

[jmcbray@carcosa.net (Jason F. McBrayer)]

I thought I'd ask to see how other people who are using org for
Getting Things Done are handling projects and their relationship to
Next Actions.  I've tried out several approaches, and while I can rule
out a few as no good, there are some with enough plusses and minuses
to keep me from being really happy with any of them.

My first go was to have a top-level category for projects, with a
headline for each project under that.  This worked for keeping track
of my list of projects, but it didn't give me any way to tell what
project a Next Action was associated with.

My next attempt was to mix together projects and next actions, with
next actions coming hierarchically under the project they were
associated with.  Projects have a tag unique to that project, but
distinct from the tags I am using for contexts (contexts start with @,
projects with nothing).  This works, but the only way to get a list of
projects is to either look manually through the file, or get the list
of tags and ignore the ones that are contexts.

I've tried two others:  one is to make PROJECT an org-todo-keyword.
This makes it very easy to get a list of projects, with the negative
side effect that projects can show up in context lists if they are
tagged with a context so that their Next Actions can inherit it (e.g.,
home improvements are all tagged @Home).  This would work fine if I
didn't use tag inheritance, or was conscientious about not putting
contexts in projects.  The other thing I've tried is to make "Project"
a tag.  This obviously works only if one is not using tag
inheritance --- if you're not, then it's easy to get a list of
projects, but if you are, you'll get all your next actions, too.

What are other people doing to keep track of their projects?  Is
having projects listable all that important?

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Jason F. McBrayer                    jmcbray@carcosa.net  |
| A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, |
| even though we do not love it.            -- Dogen        |