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Project Clarification Needed
Chris | Dec 18 2007
Hello fellow GTDers! I have recently devoted myself to the GTD system after listening to the seminar audio recording, and spending a lot of time reading most of the book/43folders.com/other personal productivity blogs. However, I still am not quite clear on everything. Here is an example: After processing, let's say I have a new project, so I put it in the projects folder. It is "Clean Apartment". I realize that that could easily be broken down into sub-projects of Clean Kitchen, Clean Bathroom, etc. Do I write out all the sub projects and just put them in the projects folder? Do I write one next action for each project? Then let's say I have everything out of the inbox and processed in its appropriate place. I look around and tell myself that a cluttered house is a cluttered mind, and I really want to start to work on cleaning up. So, what do I do now? Grab one of the sub-projects and do the next action? Then what will I do? Come up with another next action on the fly? Basically, do I limit myself to one next action for projects? The real problem I have is whether you take the next actions from the projects and put them then in your appropriate NA folders. But if you did that, how would you know what you were really working on, if everything was all jumbled and you were working on multiple projects simultaneously? Questions Asked:
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 Lots of people get stuck here...Submitted by augmentedfourth on December 18, 2007 - 5:45pm.
I got stuck on sub-projects too. I'll try to tell you how your issues got solved for me. In my system, I have a list of Actions for each project. However, I only list the ones with no dependencies (i.e. I can do them right now with no prior action) as Next Actions. Most projects only have one Next Action, but some can have more than one. (I use simpleGTD to track tasks, and only the actions with a star show up in Next Actions.) I only keep Next Actions on the lists I carry around with me. I keep my Next Action lists separated by context. This doesn't provide confusion because I only work on one Action at a time. I realized long ago that doing two things at once makes me give less than my best effort on at least one of them. (This doesn't keep me from checking email or reading RSS feeds while on the phone, though.) I eventually gave up on sub-projects. My project list is just a plain list of projects, and the only differentiation from one to the next is that I prepend "W:" to work project names and "SOMEDAY:" to Someday/Maybe projects. What I eventually found is that focusing too hard on categorization (i.e. maintaining project hierarchies like the one you describe) distracts from actually Getting Things Done. The system is just a tool, and sitting there looking at your hammer never got any houses built. Once I had a system that worked well for me, it really did just disappear into the work I do. It's more of a "reminder system" than anything else now, and focusing too slavishly on the lists means that I'm wasting mental process cycles that I could use to actually check things off the list. » POSTED IN:
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