I am a neuroscience PhD student who is just starting to implement GTD. One problem I'm having is how to manage experiments using the software tools I have tried so far (Actiontastic, GhostAction).

I would consider a single experiment to be a project - there are many actions within each one, often spread over several days, some of which are time-critical and some of which are not. Also, I have to make sure I have ordered in the right chemicals and reagents and made up my solutions in time to use them. So there is a lot to get off my mind and I find myself worrying a great deal about whether I'm ready to do my experiment or not and exactly what I have to do on each day to be ready for tomorrow.

The protocols for the experiments don't change, however, so if I decide to do a particular experiment the action list is always more or less the same, except I might be using different tissues or antibodies. So I don't want to have to create all the actions every time I do an experiment.

What I would really like is some object-orientated behaviour - to create a project class for a protocol and then create an instance of that project every time I want to do that experiment, which contains all the actions I will need to do. At least, I would like to copy and paste the actions from previous experiments to make a new one.

Does this break the GTD system in some way? I imagine the general case of repeated projects is a fairly common issue but I don't remember reading anything about it in the book. If it's okay, is there software that will do this? (I haven't looked at kGTD too closely because I wasn't sure if I was going to carry on with GTD and so didn't want to pay for OOP.)