[mjhoy]

> it seems like you want a way to easily pull stuff out of old files so your working set isn't spread out all over the place.

Hmm. What do you mean exactly? I have all sorts of stuff in my org mode files, and what keeps track of them for me is the agenda view (i.e. it finds TODOs, deadlines, events, etc).

[gkya]

I've learned agenda views quite late, it's one of the killer features of org mode. Until then I mostly used org for notes and latex export. Maybe the manuals should emphasise it a bit more, it might be hard to discover.