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Newbie question - actions 'by' a certain date?
aberrant | May 14 2006
I just finished reading GTD and I've already blocked off 2 days to get started, but something's still bothering me: what about actions that need to get done by (but not necessarily ON) a certain date? An example is a paper that needs to be written: assume that all the research has been done, and the task of writing the paper remains. Let's say it will take approximately 12 hours to write, and it's due next Thursday. How do I capture this? If I put a calendar item in for Thursday, it could be that I miss the deadline since I didn't allocate enough time. If I put it in my actions list, then I'm not guaranteed to get to it by the deadline. (Or have I missed some fundamental piece of this process?) 9 Comments
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 I just finished reading GTD...Submitted by Berko on May 14, 2006 - 5:50pm.
aberrant wrote: I just finished reading GTD and I've already blocked off 2 days to get started, but something's still bothering me: what about actions that need to get done by (but not necessarily ON) a certain date? An example is a paper that needs to be written: assume that all the research has been done, and the task of writing the paper remains. Let's say it will take approximately 12 hours to write, and it's due next Thursday. What I tend to do is set a tickler item (for me, that means an all-day event in iCal) for "$Topic paper due in 10 days" or something like that. That way, I don't worry about it until it becomes a pressing item. You could have multiple items like this. "$Topic paper due in 6 weeks. Must decide on topic" and then "$Topic paper due in one month. Get busy researching" and finally "$Topic paper due in two weeks. Get busy writing!" When you get to the last one, then you should be able to generate a list of NA's for breaking the paper down into sections. So, you could have NA's for the paper like "Write introduction," "Write method section," "Write main argument section," "Write results section," and "Write conclusion." These last NA's are all really to-be-done-as-soon-as-possible actions, whichi s what NA's really are. By making sure you only have this kind of action on your lists, you will know that all of the things on your list have to be done literally as soon as possible. » POSTED IN:
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