A project ends. An area does not.

Most apps give you lists, and then a folder to put lists in. It works until the folder contains both “Move flat” and “Home”, at which point the structure has stopped telling you anything — because those two are not the same kind of thing. One will be finished by November. The other will still be there in ten years.

The confusion has a cost you feel at review time. If everything is a list, then nothing is ever done, and a list of lists that only grows is one you eventually stop opening. The distinction GTD draws between projects and areas of responsibility exists precisely because the two need different attention: projects need a next action, areas need a periodic look to see whether they have quietly gone unattended.

An area is a standing concern. It has no dates, no completion and no progress — those would all be lies about what it is. It is a heading in the sidebar that the projects underneath belong to.

A project is work with an ending. It holds tasks, can be split into sections, and can carry its own deadline. It lives inside an area, or at the top level if it does not belong to one — a project does not need an area to exist.

Tasks live in exactly one of three places: the Inbox, a project, or Someday. That is a single field rather than a set of labels, which is what makes the next section work.

Completing a project takes it out of the sidebar and keeps it, with everything that happened inside it. That is what a container with an ending is for. The alternative is deleting it, which is the usual workaround and the worst one, because it takes the record with it — and the record of what you did is the most useful thing in a review.

At the task level there is a second outcome. A task can be cancelled rather than completed, stored separately and reversible. “I did it” and “I decided not to” are different facts, and an app offering only a tick makes you either lie or delete the evidence.

The distinction is a task-level one. A project can be completed, and not cancelled.

This is the structural choice with the largest day-to-day effect. In most apps “someday” is a tag or a filter, which means a someday task is still sitting in its project, still in the count, still catching your eye every time you open it. Deferring it changed a label and not your experience of the list.

Here it is a location. Moving a task to Someday takes it out of its project entirely; moving it back is one drag. The project shows what you are actually doing, and the someday pile is somewhere you go on purpose — which is the only condition under which people ever review it.

Two layers of structure is a common shape. What differs is the vocabulary, whether the outer layer can hold loose tasks, and whether “later” is a place or a label.

The fair summary: Things 3 has the more flexible model, and it is not close. Its areas hold loose to-dos as well as projects, it has tags, and it can cancel a project as well as a to-do, where TaskPocket can only cancel a task. What is genuinely different here is narrower: Someday is somewhere a task goes rather than something it is labelled, so deferring one takes it out of the project instead of leaving it in the count.