Are you doing your lists electronically? If so, do you do some sort of versioning so that you can see the progression of your projects. My question is how you keep track of the discreet actions you take when completing a project. If you "edit that task out" you aren't simply marking it off as completed; you're removing the text that describes those action dependencies. Perhaps it doesn't matter for you to keep track of all those actions, but I really like to.

I do keep my lists electronically but I don't keep track of completed actions. I just don't have anything that requires that amount of supervision. I was going to say that this is because I am a student but I know you are too. I do know that those in a business environment might rely on completed tasks for reviews though.

Still trying to keep it simple, I suppose you could copy the task, complete it, then edit the copy. For those that duplicate actions on their to-do list and their project list could mark it on their project. But right now I have this in mind for micro-projects, though I don't think it is limited to that.

Cool.

Electronic system for me also.

I normally put the next action (s) in the notes section and instead of marking it as complete and starting a new task, just copy and paste the text from the note as the new title, (adjusting priority and due date if I'm using them on that task as appropriate). This way I can still keep the task linked to the project item in the projects list.

When no more actions in the notes, I can mark it as complete.

At review I can look at he project, see if it has any links. If it has, all is fine and dandy, if it hasn't I need to look for a next action or close the project.

I don't keep track of completed tasks. I can mostly remember what I did in the last week (or time since last review), anything before that isn't really worth bothering with.

I normally tell PI to delete any completed tasks anyway at each review.

Rollasoc

Or, this could be a great place to use Subversion. Then you have each version of the task so you can see the chain.

I have a number of regular jobs that break into a series of tasks and I record the job as a task in Outlook, in the notes I list the first task and set the appropriate category. When that task is complete I note the date completed and enter the next task above the completed task, again changing the category.

The jobs are usually setting up user access to a specific database and the tasks run in a simple order - acknowledge user request, contact user accounts and request access, wait, add user to correct access level, notify user and send training documents - by listing them all in the notes of one task I can easily see where the job is at and estimate how long the job will take to complete.

This works for me but is only for a simple, linear task chain. More complex branched chains would probaly be better set up as projects