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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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 Breakin' it down...Submitted by augmentedfourth on December 19, 2007 - 12:05am.
I wrote a post on my blog a while back (over a year ago) about what I call "task granularity," i.e. the amount tasks must be broken up to become Actions. It's really a very personal thing. For me, Clean Bathroom would just be an Action all its own. It might be different for you, though... maybe you do the various steps of the bathroom cleaning whenever you have a spare minute and you don't carve out the time to do the whole bathroom all at once. It sounds like the physical aspect of your system is very different from mine. Part of my Processing step is to re-transcribe everything to its new location, not just collect the scraps and put them in the same place. As I mentioned before, I capture tasks to simpleGTD, and then I wrote a script on my Linux machine to pull down the SGTD lists and print each context on a separate index card. My contexts are actually lists, not loose scraps, which helps me to view the whole context at once. In addition, the re-transcription of tasks when entering them into the system helps me to clarify my thoughts before making the list. Notes scrawled onto individual 3x5 cards wouldn't make a very good system! » POSTED IN:
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