This seems similar in concept to what I have had to learn to do with my projects at work. Each project is actually a standard set of subprojects (or stages) with multiple tasks for each subproject, and I may have several projects being worked at the same time but in different stages. To help me maintain a clue on what was being done, I set up a macro in Outlook to automatically create a task for all the subprojects of a project. Then I add a due date to the task so that I can use the handy reminder feature in Outlook (“Hey, David - you should be done with this by now!”). Then I just work from the list.

The difficulty seems to be when your various projects are so distinct as to have unique subprojects or processes, but basic project management techniques seem to help with this, I think.

I was a bit surprised when GTD made no mention of how to plan for due dates, other than setting your “hard” landscape. For me the trick is to make a very modest daily to-do list that includes things like “Start research for article” or “Revise that paper for 1 hour”. Not promising any big finishes, but slap enough of those together and things move along.

David: I ganked some great tips from Janice Fraser who has an excellent, Excel-based method for tracking repeating projects with parallel tracks. It’s great for publishing in particular.

I know what you mean about those small differences. The artful thing in PM is learning to key on how projects differ one to another. That’s where the devil lives. :)

I wouldn’t call your daily to-do list heretical at all. I think that when Allen rails against putting a daily to-do list on your calendar or in a tickler file, he’s talking about trying to write one for the distant future. Writing one as a part of a daily mini-review is not only kosher, but recommended: “Review your lists as often as you need to, to get them off your mind.” I’ve been using your Seven Things hack for exactly that—it helps me to sweep through my list of actions in the morning and select a handful of the most important. Of course, I rarely only have 7, but it’s the same idea. And when I get interrupted, having that list helps me get right back into flow (which is the whole point of GTD, isn’t it?).

Leland: I dunno. I think the idea of a daily list defies the “touch it once” philosophy, although I see your point. Maybe you’re right, and I am kosher.

(Speaking of which, I love that GTD fandom has evolved to a point where relative strangers can conduct Talmudic debates on its interpretation. ;-)   )

I’ll concur w/ Leland—daily to-do lists are useful and not out of step with GTD. The benefit of GTD (and I am relatively new to it all) is both a way of conceiving my tasks and a location for keeping everything together. As long as I know that I have everything I need to do on a master list, then picking the key items for the day/week seems reasonable. If I make a daily to-do list, I still consulted my larger NextAction list, and I continue to consult it throughout the day, uptdating the to-do list accordingly. Allen’s argument about daily to-do’s was that a daily to-do should not be your only system. If that daily to-do is tied to a larger action items list (isn’t your NextActions list really just a big to-do?) then it seems to me you are being efficient. What Allen wanted (and what the classic to-do misses) is the big picture that you acquire setting up his system. That’s my read.

It seems that, rather than creating a new list, what you’re doing is reshuffling your existing project subgroups (subprojects?) and defining a near-term goal. Hardly trayf. ;)

Let’s see. If I was to apply this to my idiosyncratic folders-and-cards GTD project system, I’d take whatever projects minifolders are “on the map” for this week (Sprocket Redesign recommendations and budget SWAG would each have their own minifolders), and pin them up over the desk. Then pin a “near-term goal” up next to them.

There. You’ve got a short-term commitment to accomplish that limited subset of your larger goal, without having to rewrite any extra lists.

Not to get all “let’s talk about me,” it’s just retranslating into how I’d implement it help grok the idea. I like it, and now I have to go take pictures when I get home. :)

The “avoid daily to-do’s” rule was also to keep you from feeling defeated when one of those went unfinished and you had to move it to another day. So part of it is conditioning yourself that it is okay if one of your non-time specific next actions doesn’t get done, as long as it stays on your list for later use.

The latest Palm OS has a nifty feature to help do this. You can pick certain to-do list categories to show up on your calendar when you assign a date to the to-do item. Each day, review your next actions in your to-do list, assign today’s date to your “daily wish list” and they sit on your calendar for the day. If you don’t cross it off, it pops up the next day, where you can always set it back to “no date” if the window of opportunity has passed.

As a long-time GTD acolyte, I gradually evolved to doing exactly the same thing on both fronts. And, after months of testing, it seems to be yielding stellar results.

At first, I similarly felt like I was ‘cheating’ somehow - especially with the daily subset of actions. But, eventually, I realized it was actually bringing me closer to, not farther from, the ‘touch it once’ ideal.

The area of GTD that has always seemed to come up a bit short for me is choosing which next action to do next. It took me a while, but I finally realized that my problem stemmed from having a job that, like yours, didn’t provide nearly enough ‘contexts’ to break down my work reasonably. Running a movie company, I have huge @online and @phone lists, and very little else. With only the unbroken lists, each time I finished a task, I’d have to sift through the entirety of both, looking for the next most important thing. In essence, I was ‘touching’ every single one of my next actions countless times each day, weighing the priority of each every time I moved from one task to the next.

Instead, now, I do the weighing just once each morning, and separate out the next actions that are the highest priority. I feel far less overwhelmed - not because the shorter list gives me the false impression that I have less to accomplish, but because I’m no longer subconsciously terrified that something high-priority is falling through the cracks with successive list scans.

As talmud study is always an attempt to examine and extend the spirit underlying the letter of the law, I can’t help but think Rav Allen would be pleased with the modifications.

JoshD—could you explain more about your setup? That photo looks intriguing. I have been trying for a while to move to a completely paper-based GTD implementation and this idea of using little envelopes looks awesome.

I’ve been doing something like this for a while now, but I really like the ‘moving part’ nomenclature, which definitely clarifies things for me. I’ll be implementing this for sure tomorrow at my weekly review.

JoshD—sorry, I didn’t see that you have an actual GTD-with-index-cards photoset! You are the bomb!

Out of curiosity: have you tried actually filing your cards in one of those pocket moleskines? Or does that not work?

Boy, I too was feeling guilty. I found myself getting up each morning morning, scanning all my contextual next action lists, and then jotting down only the things I really thought I could get done that day on a fresh page in my Moleskine.

I knew it violated the rules, but I found it worked very well to only take with me the things I could actually accomplish.

One big difference from the daily “to do” lists I made before GTD: Those old lists were created off the top of my head, and typically included everything I could possibly think of that might be a task. I never came close to checking off even half the list, of course.

Doesn’t the daily task list have you switching contexts too often? I realize some of you are at the computer all day, or at the phone all day, but couldn’t you break those down a little more? I noticed that I had the same problem until I created a new context for my programming environment that was separate from the general @Computer context. Or is this list more like a list of mini-projects rather than discreet next actions? I admit that at the end of my weekly review I also generate a list of weekly goals that I then send to my boss so that he is aware what I plan to accomplish in the next week and how I performed against last weeks goals.

Josh R:

I’ve tried the pocket in the back of my moleskine mini. It works OK for a single category.

To be honest, I haven’t bought a moleskine pocket yet, just because the envelopes work for me, and I use them for projects anyhow. Buying one is on my someday/maybe list —which is a box on my desk that I toss index cards and projects into! :)

I’m seeing two messages here. First is the idea that with a large number of todo’s there is a desire to narrow it down to a few to work on in a day. I think that’s ok. For example, I am trying to have a “power hour” every morning where I spend my time focused on accomplishing a few things before the world interupts. One of those things is a mini-review, not at the project level, but at the task level to understand what I need to work on that day.

The other side of the coin sounds more like people aren’t really defining next actions. For example one comment was “Revise that paper for 1 hour.” If that is the logical next step then it shouldn’t be listed as Revice paper, but as “revise for 1 hour” or complete revision of first 2 pages…whatever is a logical chuck of work to tackle at a single moment. That has been the biggest revelation to me. Whenever I see something on my list that I mentally push back on, I ask myself if it really is refined down to the very next element. Keeping things as simple as possible is what is allowing me to succeed. It means a lot more updating of the list, but I live in an interupt driven world, and it’s better to have things defined as elemental as possible.

It seems to me this map-fold technique is more or less breaking your major time-span projects into mini ones. I’ve long done this, even before taking up GTD. It’s actually the best and most effective way I’ve found to not lose sight of the ultimate goal. I think the actual weekly reviews espouse this to an extent, where you do end up taking stock of all the top-level projects you’re working on.

If you complete an action-project in a given week as a goal, you can then ‘move forward’ a metric that’s easier to measure than revisiting all the tasks you’ve done. It doesn’t seem as much of a hack to me as a more in-depth take on what GTD is about. If the project takes years, you can’t keep visiting that level weekly, but you should be visiting a small sub-project of that higher goal. The granularity is there, and if you break it down to a weekly and then daily view, it’s much easier to accomplish everything without feeling overwhelmed.

On literal Map Folding and the tourist metaphor - The US Army FM series has an official map-folding technique (B-2) to allow for easily panning a just-whats-near folded map as you move. The folding technique violates a basic rule of origami — you carefully slit the center of the map.

Whoa—thanks for the link, Bill. That looks really cool!

What an amazing site! Filled with helpful goodness.

I do create a daily list from my to do list, but it includes only items that have a today or first thing tomorrow deadline. I put what time it’s due and who I’m handing it off to. If it looks hairy, I try to get some prioritization of projects.

I use a 5x8 lined Post-It and keep space for the additional info I might need - assistant’s phone number, etc.

It also shuts up my boss, because he knows that if it is on the post-it, it will get done that day. Or he’ll get a big head’s up telling him why it’s not happening.

I don’t mean to pimp a particular app, but this discussion is why I have Life Balance in my current organizational mix.

http://www.llamagraphics.com/

Organize your projects in a hierarchical outline, assign to various contextual places (i.e., put in categories you can make large swaths of the list go away as needed), determine importance and dependencies one at a time, and then switch to a to-do list that filters and organizes to show just what needs doing.

This list will be ludicrously long if you turn off your filters, so you get into the habit of forcing yourself to read what’s on top of the list. Or at least, you try to. I’m on this site right now to procrastinate what’s on the top of mine.

But as I mentioned in the Holy Grail discussion, it falls way short in its integration with other data munging applications, and so I’m facing the decision of whether I need to carry around a separate Palm PDA purely for the purpose of handheld access to this. Very annoying.

The core of DA’s objections to daily task lists is that it sorts by priority first: In other words, most of your tasks don’t make it onto that daily list.

The GTD method says that the first constraint is by context, or what you can do whereever/whenever you happen to be. The next constraint is how much time you have available, vs the length of time a given task takes. The final constraint is your mental energy, vs. what the task requires. Once you’ve satisfied those constraints, pick the highest priority of what is left.

So, if your life is such that in the morning you can create an appropriate “short list” that consists of the all the things that will likely fit in your day’s context/time/energy constraints, knock yourself out.

BUT.. You still need to keep the complete list at hand if there is any reasonable chance that your day will mutate beyond expected constraints.

My usual comprimise is to take things from the appropriate category of my Palm to-do list, and move them to “unfiled” if they are on my “short list.” I also use unfiled for capturing new stuff. That way it is sitting at the top for my perusal, but doesn’t prevent me from accessing the rest.

Fabulous discussion, I’m glad I found it!

I like ResultsManager to manage the whole GTD system, and particularly Next Actions. It gives me both date-oriented and context-oriented views of my Next Actions. The date-oriented view makes sure that the things that need to get done today are at the top of the list. The context-oriented view reminds me that after I make today’s one essential phone call, I can bash through the next five or ten calls, too.

ResultsManager (http://www.gyronix.com) is an add-on package for the MindManager (http://www.mindjet.com) visual organizer package. The Pro version includes Outlook sync capabilities.

Great Plan…

43 Folders: Map Folding: Building a Weekly Plan

I already have an outliner document like this! Well, I will… I did it for the summer redesign much like this but this is a bit refined in the right direction. The point of being able to quickly ret…