I’ll chime in here since I don’t feel like my general flow was represented by the comments so far. I realized I needed to have plain text to have the flexibility I needed. Most todo apps and project managers keep your data locked up nicely into their app and accessing it in a useable form outside the program is difficult. I need to be able to keep track of everything and then search through everything, picking apart what I need and extract the text to other places for further processing.
Prior to discovering TP I was using Emacs and a few Lisp scripts to write what I called “journal entries” which were really Todo lists. This worked great but I was duplicating information in many files, and extracting the useful bits meant writing a collection of Python scripts.
Now I use a single TP list to track everything. The trick is in the proper selection of tags so that I can slice and dice the list into the useful bits I want to see. Then, every 6 months I archive the list and start a new one, extracting out all the important bits and archiving them into the other docs I need. Using plain text means even if TP’s powerful searching goes away (@jessegrosjean don’t let this happen!) , I could still write my own set of Python scripts (or use Birch) to parse the files.
I’ve written a few TP scripts to help with this. The most important part of my workflow is to use the Pareto Principle to prioritize my tasks (with the knowledge that a great many things on my todo list really aren’t that important). So I wrote a few scripts to let me set priority for tasks (a combination of effort and benefit), then sort my list according to priority. Then, using search in TP, I always get the results in the priority that makes sense to me.
I’ll also add that I use FoldingText (which I find to be brilliant in so many ways) as a general note-taker, idea generator, and individual project manager. So I have FoldingText files for each project, and then the actionable items from that get merged into my TP file. This separates the dumping ground of constant ideas and notes from actionable items.