Piles in Pilcrow aren’t a filing system. A pile of laundry on a chair isn’t sorted by owner or category, it’s just the stuff that’s currently relevant, pulled together because you’re dealing with it right now. That’s closer to how the piles function in Pilcrow than a folder or a category would be. A pile groups snippets around whatever you’re focused on at a given moment (a project, a trip, a task) without forcing you to decide which single “drawer” each piece of information permanently belongs in.
A fundamental aspect of Pilcrow is that a snippet is autonomous and independent. A snippet doesn’t live in any pile, but piles can show you snippets.
Imagine I have a couple of projects running. I have a laundry pile where I collect information for those projects. I’ll have a unique to-do list in each of those piles. But I’ve also got a to-do list for my upcoming road trip. Because I can send a snippet to any pile, I can put that road trip to-do on all my project piles. Because the snippet is independent of the pile, I check something off my road trip list as I view it from one project, I view the same to-do list from my second project.
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