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hi rmathes,
Yes, I think the categories and the areas of focus are the same thing. At another time I could be more specific or maybe provide some screen shots but in short, the key thing at the heart of TR is really two things:
1) creating a life plan, year plan, and quarterly plan in the form of goals for each time period...
and
2) grouping your tasks into blocks and for each block defining not just the tasks (the MAP) but also the purpose and the result you are seeking for the block. {not trying to give an explanation to the uninitiated, sounds like you are familiar}
So after messing around with it for a while, here is what I did.
-made personal and professional into folders
-in each folder, created a project for each area of focus/category
-I then use the notes field for the category (project) to hold the overall category purpose and outcome (and might move roles, resources, and three to thrive etc in there as well in the future)
-then under that I create a series of nested groups for quarterly goals/each quarter and annual goals and then 'This week's goals (activities)'
-and this is key-- for each group I define an acronym which I put in parenthesis after it -- for example my current tasks uses (TWG) in the name.
-So now, what I can do is view my projects and if I want to review everything for each category-- the vision, purpose, roles, etc as well as the 1 year plan, the quartelry plans and teh current actions..then great, thats how its structured.
-If I want to just view my current activities, what I do is put (TWG) into the search bar ( adn I created a perspective for this)-- this effectively filters out all the annual goals, quarterly goals, etc...so I just see the cateogry name, the header 'This weeks Goals (TWG)'
-what is also cool is that i can use the keyboard shortcut to show/hide notes, this way if I want to get the 'juice' of seeing the vision/outcome and purpose for each category above the actual tasks...then I can see that, but if I jsut want to look at tasks, I just hit the keyboard shortcut commmand, option apostrophe, and I only see the actual tasks (grouped by project/focus area).
-Now one personal twist that I do on TOYL...when creating RPM blocks, what I actually find is that some tasks really just align with the overall vision and purpose of one of my categories. For these I dont need to add additional Vision/purpose info for that RPM block b/c its already in its category and it woudl just be a repition. In other cases, I might have a narrower RPM block that I want to define a more specific vision/purpose for. When that happens what I simply do is create the RPM block as a nesd group and then, again, use the note area for for the group of the RPM block to include the vision/results and the purpose (and of course the list of tasks below is the MAP). This all works pretty well. You dont see the R/P/M in a left to right format as TR teaches, but other than that it works.
PLUS, you can then layer in contexts, which are not part of RPM but are also very helpful. This works b/c even though I have a ton of stuff in my database that arent really tasks (quarterly goals, etc) I simply set up the contexts so that I ahve one folder of contexts I call 'RPM' and these are all the database items that arent really tasks , they are more labels or other data...then I use perspectives for my context view and I just exclude that folder, so I dont get all that extra stuff that woudl be 'junk' in the context view.
Hope that make sense and helps
Oh-- another thing I've done is put some motivational photos for each category into the notes area...very helpful. (tho I wish I had more control over the layout of this area, for these purposes, tables within Notes would be super helpful).