I've been doing the "tasks" part (I can't remember the official name for this, but the things that just have one action that you place in your various contexts) for a while now, but I'm still confused about projects and end up just making a task item when I really should make a project for it. The part that's confusing me is the next actions. "next" actions, and the way it's explained, even in the book, sounds like what's the next thing to do to progress this along. That part I get but what about the things that I need to do sometime, but not necessarily the next action?

Let me give an example. I'm a programmer and I'm currently working on a new web interface for our company's intranet/ordering system. I have the next action set to "design db layout for account records" (I'm doing everything in chunks because of the size of this). As I'm working along or at home or wherever I'll come up with ideas that I need to do. For example I still need to create a way to change the employee passwords. Another one is the notes box I want to 'stick' to the bottom of the page. These don't have to happen next, it can happen whenever I feel like it, just has to be done before it's complete. Well there's probably a couple dozen of these loose ends that need to be done before I can say it's done, and that's so far. Do I make all those next actions? They don't really need to happen next to move the project along, that's really just the "design db layout for account records" action.

Looking at th MonkeyGTD page, which was what I planned on using for projects, there's a tasks and a someday/maybe section, which is probably where I'd put all that stuff at. But they're also next actions as I CAN do them next if I wanted to, and it would move the project forward a little bit. And then what about the next "next action" after that db layout? Although I know that after I design it I then have to build it in SQL, and then after that I need to create the web pages for it, but what if I'm worried that I wouldn't realize what the next "next action" is after I finish this one? Another way of saying it is where do I put next actions that depends on the current next action to be complete? I guess the main thing I'm tying to understand is the difference between a Next Action for a project and what's just a Task for the project? I'm sure (in fact I'm almost positive) I'm making this to be a lot more complicated than it should be.