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Project Clarification Needed
Chris | Dec 18 2007
Hello fellow GTDers! I have recently devoted myself to the GTD system after listening to the seminar audio recording, and spending a lot of time reading most of the book/43folders.com/other personal productivity blogs. However, I still am not quite clear on everything. Here is an example: After processing, let’s say I have a new project, so I put it in the projects folder. It is “Clean Apartment”. I realize that that could easily be broken down into sub-projects of Clean Kitchen, Clean Bathroom, etc. Do I write out all the sub projects and just put them in the projects folder? Do I write one next action for each project? Then let’s say I have everything out of the inbox and processed in its appropriate place. I look around and tell myself that a cluttered house is a cluttered mind, and I really want to start to work on cleaning up. So, what do I do now? Grab one of the sub-projects and do the next action? Then what will I do? Come up with another next action on the fly? Basically, do I limit myself to one next action for projects? The real problem I have is whether you take the next actions from the projects and put them then in your appropriate NA folders. But if you did that, how would you know what you were really working on, if everything was all jumbled and you were working on multiple projects simultaneously? Questions Asked:
Thanks! 6 Comments
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 Helpful Sub-Projects TutorialSubmitted by Todd V on December 19, 2007 - 10:21pm.
I struggled with how GTD addresses sub-projects in relationship to projects as well. I eventually came up with a really good solution and designed a sub-projects Quicktime tutorial for explaining that approach. I think you will find some great ideas for applying the same philosophy to your own GTD setup. It’s the best way I’ve found to handle sub-projects with GTD. »
 Lots of people get stuck here...Submitted by augmentedfourth on December 18, 2007 - 4:45pm.
I got stuck on sub-projects too. I’ll try to tell you how your issues got solved for me. In my system, I have a list of Actions for each project. However, I only list the ones with no dependencies (i.e. I can do them right now with no prior action) as Next Actions. Most projects only have one Next Action, but some can have more than one. (I use simpleGTD to track tasks, and only the actions with a star show up in Next Actions.) I only keep Next Actions on the lists I carry around with me. I keep my Next Action lists separated by context. This doesn’t provide confusion because I only work on one Action at a time. I realized long ago that doing two things at once makes me give less than my best effort on at least one of them. (This doesn’t keep me from checking email or reading RSS feeds while on the phone, though.) I eventually gave up on sub-projects. My project list is just a plain list of projects, and the only differentiation from one to the next is that I prepend “W:” to work project names and “SOMEDAY:” to Someday/Maybe projects. What I eventually found is that focusing too hard on categorization (i.e. maintaining project hierarchies like the one you describe) distracts from actually Getting Things Done. The system is just a tool, and sitting there looking at your hammer never got any houses built. Once I had a system that worked well for me, it really did just disappear into the work I do. It’s more of a “reminder system” than anything else now, and focusing too slavishly on the lists means that I’m wasting mental process cycles that I could use to actually check things off the list. »
Thanks!Submitted by cmr924 on December 18, 2007 - 5:53pm.
Thanks for the replies so far! Augmentedfourth, I think I understand, but I still have So, let’s say you wanted to clean your apartment. After breaking that down, maybe even just in your head, Clean Bathroom becomes a project. Do you then just make a list of next actions that have to do with cleaning the bathroom, and put them in the At Home folder (for example)? I am going to probably start out pretty low-tech, so how would that look on my end? Do I take all these scraps of paper from the folder, and just start? Or when I process, do I write down anything from the inbox, into a list of NAs in the appropriate folder? Sorry for all the questions, but I think I am close! »
Breakin' it down...Submitted by augmentedfourth on December 18, 2007 - 11:05pm.
I wrote a post on my blog a while back (over a year ago) about what I call “task granularity,” i.e. the amount tasks must be broken up to become Actions. It’s really a very personal thing. For me, Clean Bathroom would just be an Action all its own. It might be different for you, though… maybe you do the various steps of the bathroom cleaning whenever you have a spare minute and you don’t carve out the time to do the whole bathroom all at once. It sounds like the physical aspect of your system is very different from mine. Part of my Processing step is to re-transcribe everything to its new location, not just collect the scraps and put them in the same place. As I mentioned before, I capture tasks to simpleGTD, and then I wrote a script on my Linux machine to pull down the SGTD lists and print each context on a separate index card. My contexts are actually lists, not loose scraps, which helps me to view the whole context at once. In addition, the re-transcription of tasks when entering them into the system helps me to clarify my thoughts before making the list. Notes scrawled onto individual 3x5 cards wouldn’t make a very good system! »
“Notes scrawled ontoSubmitted by cmr924 on December 19, 2007 - 10:14am.
“Notes scrawled onto individual 3x5 cards wouldn’t make a very good system!” Are you saying the hPDA is a bad idea? Blasphemy! I love index cards! Thanks for the further clarification! »
No, no, no...Submitted by augmentedfourth on December 19, 2007 - 2:50pm.
I scrawl notes on cards all day long… I even use a special 3x5-card wallet to carry around my hPDA! I’m just saying that those handwritten notes (at least for me) need to get thrown in the inbox, processed, then discarded. If I tried to organize myself on a continual basis with those illegibly-penned missives I’d go insane. My hPDA (as I mentioned above) has blank cards for note-taking, but my context-specific Next Action lists are nicely laser-printed (then scrawled on throughout the day and re-printed the next morning… I buy unruled blue 3x5’s in bulk). »
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