To answer your question, Steve, I really don't have a good system for linking individual items back to a project outline now. I use iCal, Sticky Brain, and a Palm in order to have all my scheduling and contact information on both home and work computers and my Palm. I have a memo in StickyB for each project. For complex or long projects, I'll put the action items right in with my notes with a checkbox. Then during weekly review I paste them into iCal. In iCal, I give tasks a date only if they're date-related. I keep Next Actions undated and in an Unfiled Calendar in iCal, so I can turn that calendar off and not have to see the big overwhelming list all the time. But they all get synched to my Palm. (Of course, with this system, I can't use the Tasks categories on my Palm.)

Now, would I like to be able to click a link in a StickyBrain memo and go to the task in iCal? And click a task in iCal and have the project outline open up? Sure, but I have not been able to find any software that does that AND synchs to my Palm and to multiple computers AND lets me use categories (contexts). Since I'm on a Mac, Entourage would be the closest, but my Palm is a T3 and the conduit for this model is faulty.

In fact, I've become so frustrated with the inability or unwillingness of software companies to handle simple things like calendaring, outlining, and keywording without using huge, slow, buggy database files to do it, I went analog for a while and loved it. But in the end, I couldn't get over my addiction to being able to make appointments in my Palm everywhere I go and upload to one main calendar on my Mac, and I'd rather keyboard than write longhand, so I'm back to electronics.