Spend $13 at Home Depot on a 4' X 8' melamine shower board (same material as plastic whiteboards).

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000679.php

Use post-its and dry-erase markers to rough out task dependencies and timelines.

Have you met the PERT chart? It's another way of looking at the information on a Gantt, but it's easier to construct. (In MS project, they're linked so you can switch from one view to the other).

What you do is work out the 'deliverables' (what I need to have produced so I know that the job's done -- in GTD speak it might be a completed NA or more likely a (sub-)project). Draw a box for each deliverable and record how long you think its going to take. Then work out what needs to have been done before you can start the NA which finally produces that deliverable. That goes in its own box with an arrow to the next. If you put times on you can work out critical paths an so on as well. The information can then be turned into a Gantt.

I find them easier to work with as they're more free form. You're not tied to any specific dates or ordering until you've got all the information.

Hope that helps a bit.

Steve

I have always wished I could have a larger white board!!! You sir are a genius!!!

This is the same problem I've been working with.
My solution is to keep "Projects" separate from my GTD Lists.
See my recent post on Projects and GTD

If I read your post correctly though, you may have related (interdependant) tasks form separate projects?

I have a similar Project system to appelq, so thought I'd throw in my method. As well as marking actions as "NA" in my project lists (kept in Evernote, but I like the idea of using OneNote, might try that out...), I also mark them "Calendar" if they've been assigned to a particular time in my calendar (e.g. actually going to the doctor, if the project is making and attending a doctor's appointment). Finally, and most relevently, I mark some of them as "Waiting for... such and such to be completed" so that when I review my projects I can just skip over that one without having to think about why I can't make a next action for them. It also focuses my mind on finishing the other task(s).

Btw I used to put these on my Waiting for list, but I found it was too irritating looking at them every day, and left the Waiting for list for people who I need to chase for answers, rather than trying to use it as a reminder system for myself as well.

Hey guys, these are all great discussions. I'll check them all out! :) I'm slowly understanding the systems a bit more deeply now. My real bane is that I'm a very visual-thinker. I tend to want to see things in space rather than written word etc. So, I tend to think with graphs. I think that's why the Gaant is so excellent for me... I can visually identify related/required tasks for larger goals.

I'll check these all out, guys! Thanks a ton!! :)

[If I make any break-throughs, I'll be back to post!]

You may consider sending OmniGroup a feature request to add a Gantt column type to OmniOutliner. Ecco, a columnar outliner for Windows that rarely gets the love it deserves, has a Gantt column type that's pretty useful for visual folks. It's useful for more than just scheduling too... for instance, it's nice to be able to look at a list of employees and view the days they've booked off for vacations as stacked Gantt rows.

Note that Ecco doesn't support vertical bars of the type you describe; it depends on you using the outliner to represent dependencies. That's usually the best way to do project management with an outliner. It's not as general as a full-scale project management tool, where subitems from different parent items may have interlinked dependencies, but those programs end up being overkill most of the time, and outlining is a much more elegant metaphor that suffices for the vast majority of projects with dependencies.