If you want to continue to use iCal, I would suggest doing your project planning, where you outline all the steps for completing the project. Then, at some comfortable interval, add new NA's to your iCal tasks. The trick here is to not let your projects languish between your review of your project planning material for lack of having a NA in your task list. For this reason, I would recommend a daily or every-other-daily review of your projects.

Another solution would be to have a calendar for each project in iCal. Create all your tasks there as a project planning space. As new NA's come to the fore, you can just change the calendar to the calendar for the appropriate context. If you create a calendar for each project, do put them in a calendar group so that you can easily turn those all on and off at once and they won't clutter up your "real" calendars. It'll save a lot of hassle.

Journler or Mori.

Either is great and enough room to adjust to your style.

Both of those got insanely slow after putting in a bunch of stuff in them, for me. Around 80 items, it just began to get sluggish as hell on my G4 mini and iBook G4.

Well I can assure you that their are users of each app who have far more entries than 80 (thousands) without a problem.

I'm using a combination of actiontastic (which understands next actions) and iCal (which combines the lists with the calendar and syncs to my palm. The only trouble is that I have to remember which context each task was in, because the categories/calendars aren't synced.

Yes, that stinks. I'm hoping that iCal will see a major improvement. As I understand it, the ical standard has room for categories so it is mostly a question of implementation (iCal is based on the ical open standard) .

But then again, Palm seems to be fading.