43 Folders

Back to Work

Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

Join us via RSS, iTunes, or at 5by5.tv.

”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Large personal projects

The Holiday Season is a much bigger deal than it used to be. In my parents' family, when I was single, there was limited gift-shopping, a tree, houseguests, a church service of my choice.

Now I have moved away, and married, and had kids, and things have changed. My kids have responsibilities at school and church -- there's Advent and St. Nicholas' Day and gifts for needy families. There are many more gifts to buy, and at least half of them have to be ready for the last day of school, or in time to ship, or before people travel. We set aside a special Saturday to trim the tree, and before that the furniture has to be rearranged and the tree assembled and the lights tested and strung and the candy canes bought. This year, it's our turn to host the big family Christmas (with some friends invited), which means cleaning the carpets, settling the dispute with the furniture store over the new dining table, finding someone who still fits into the Santa suit, getting the traditional decorations that are stored at someone else's house (not sure whose). And a big Italian fish dinner that I am not consulted on, because I'm not the Italian, but I'd dang sure better have the right dishes available.

In other words, lots of tasks, lots of subprojects, lots of intermediate deadlines; chains of dependent tasks that have to be finished before different scheduled events; tasks that belong to more than one dependency chain; critical-path situations where letting one task slip can create a crisis further down the chain.

Last year, I tried project-management software (a clone of MS Project) and it didn't work at all; it was too heavy, too difficult to update daily, and too inflexible. It wanted you to figure out the best time for a task, and do it at that time.

So, two questions for discussion:

1) How do you work with something like this? Dependency chains are not a strong point of GTD. Neither is this kind of scheduling (how soon do I have to start X so I can do Z when I have to?).

2) What can I do with the Project file from last year? I could just export to Outlook, but then I lose the relationships between tasks. Should I just print the Gantt?

-Herah

Herah's picture

I did capture a lot...

I did capture a lot in that Project file last year...maybe the best I can do with that is print it out, do a little more braindump on it, and re-enter everything in some simpler form. My PDA Project clone won't print, so I need to get something that will...

My mind tends to run in dependency chains, and there never seems to be a simple, workable way to represent them so I don't have to think about them.

 
EXPLORE 43Folders THE GOOD STUFF

Popular
Today

Popular
Classics

An Oblique Strategy:
Honor thy error as a hidden intention


STAY IN THE LOOP:

Subscribe with Google Reader

Subscribe on Netvibes

Add to Technorati Favorites

Subscribe on Pageflakes

Add RSS feed

The Podcast Feed

Cranking

Merlin used to crank. He’s not cranking any more.

This is an essay about family, priorities, and Shakey’s Pizza, and it’s probably the best thing he’s written. »

Scared Shitless

Merlin’s scared. You’re scared. Everybody is scared.

This is the video of Merlin’s keynote at Webstock 2011. The one where he cried. You should watch it. »