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A 'Next actions' question -GTD newbie question

Hi all ,
After reading most of the "getting things done " book , there is one thing that I don't really understand as far as Next actions are concerned.

Let's say that I have a project which is to mail some books to a friend of mine .So first I need to get her adress :this contains of an action of emailing her ,then waiting for her reply.
Then there's the action of packing the books [@home ] and then there's an "errands" type of action of going to the post office and mailing it.

What I can't figure out ,is whether I should have all those listed as next actions in their separate contexts ,for the same project ,at the same time -ort should I enter the first action,then complete it ,and only then add the next action to it's context? I mean ,in most cases there are numerous and dependent actions in a project ,which belong to different contexts,right?

I'm using the "nextaction" tracking tool for managing my next actions,and there's no way of defining dependency there -but the mail question is ,how is this supposed to work,the real-GTD way?

Thanks :)

Berko's picture

Hold on there, I thought...

Claire wrote:
Hold on there, I thought it was exactly the point of GTD that these items shouldn't be on your NA list until they are the very next action you can take? That's the principle I stick to. So in my system, "drop off books at PO" would be on a waiting for list, or on the project list (I'm now using Evernote for this, it's excellent if you have a laptop with you most of the time - check out GTDWannabe's webpage for details on how she sets it up). But I would have "box them up" on my NA list (probably under @Home) because I can do that before I write the address on the outside.

I approached it from this point of view for a while, but then I started putting the next action from each project for each context on the NA card. That might be a little unorthodox, but it works for me. If you wait until your weekly review to put the very next physical action that will carry the project forward, mailing those books will take a month!

 
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