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