So I wanted to talk about the distinction between projects/actions, and project support material, and reference, and how different people handle these things.
For my personal system (again, my work system is a GTD/Kanban meshing that is so far from GTD that it's off topic), I have the following buckets:
APA Lists
Someday/Maybe Lists
Listy Lists (Yes, it's silly, but that's what my brain came up with.)
Project Support Material
Reference
- APA Lists: Active (NOT Someday/Maybe) projects and actions in OmniFocus. I'm coining the term "APA Lists" (Active Project/Action Lists) for ease of writing this.
One of my top priorities in designing my GTD system is to keep the APA lists as lean as humanly possible. This is based purely on my personal dislike of dealing with long lists at times when I'm not sitting down with the specific purpose of dealing with long lists. If the lists are not lean, I will not use them. That is a fact that I have been unable to change, so I'm working with it.
So anything that could be moved out of this category into another category, should be.
- Someday/Maybe Lists: These are documents in OmniOutliner, but they could just as easily be word processing documents. These are SUPPOSED to contain potentially actionable things, while fairly ruthlessly excluding anything that could, again, go to another category.
For eample, a line "Read about Agile software development" is just fine in my Someday/Maybe list. But the list of book titles for that project should be pushed out, either into project support material or a Listy List.
Usually, a project in Someday/Maybe should NOT have actions--it will usually just be a project statement. If a project is started and then demoted back to Someday/Maybe, its traces should instead be in project support material.
- Listy Lists: These are lists like Books to Read, Perfumes to Sniff, Seeds to Consider, Sewing Projects to Try. They're a sort of merging of Someday/Maybe and Reference and Project Support Material.
- Project Support Material: This is more or less as described in standard GTD, except for my strong goal of moving as much as humanly possible out of my APA lists and into project support material.
So, a person with a higher tolerance for long lists might have a project "Read about Agile Programming" with a list of specific titles in the Next Actions. While I will have a list of titles as project support material, and the APA lists will just have:
Project: Read about Agile programming.
Next Action: Choose and start a title from the list.
So what gets reviewed? During the weekly review, I review the APA lists and the Someday/Maybe lists at their review frequency. I'm likely to review the project support material for active projects. I don't specifically review the Listy Lists, though I'm likely to edit them as part of a weekly review, so they get cleaned up now and then.
What do other people do?
For my personal system (again, my work system is a GTD/Kanban meshing that is so far from GTD that it's off topic), I have the following buckets:
APA Lists
Someday/Maybe Lists
Listy Lists (Yes, it's silly, but that's what my brain came up with.)
Project Support Material
Reference
- APA Lists: Active (NOT Someday/Maybe) projects and actions in OmniFocus. I'm coining the term "APA Lists" (Active Project/Action Lists) for ease of writing this.
One of my top priorities in designing my GTD system is to keep the APA lists as lean as humanly possible. This is based purely on my personal dislike of dealing with long lists at times when I'm not sitting down with the specific purpose of dealing with long lists. If the lists are not lean, I will not use them. That is a fact that I have been unable to change, so I'm working with it.
So anything that could be moved out of this category into another category, should be.
- Someday/Maybe Lists: These are documents in OmniOutliner, but they could just as easily be word processing documents. These are SUPPOSED to contain potentially actionable things, while fairly ruthlessly excluding anything that could, again, go to another category.
For eample, a line "Read about Agile software development" is just fine in my Someday/Maybe list. But the list of book titles for that project should be pushed out, either into project support material or a Listy List.
Usually, a project in Someday/Maybe should NOT have actions--it will usually just be a project statement. If a project is started and then demoted back to Someday/Maybe, its traces should instead be in project support material.
- Listy Lists: These are lists like Books to Read, Perfumes to Sniff, Seeds to Consider, Sewing Projects to Try. They're a sort of merging of Someday/Maybe and Reference and Project Support Material.
- Project Support Material: This is more or less as described in standard GTD, except for my strong goal of moving as much as humanly possible out of my APA lists and into project support material.
So, a person with a higher tolerance for long lists might have a project "Read about Agile Programming" with a list of specific titles in the Next Actions. While I will have a list of titles as project support material, and the APA lists will just have:
Project: Read about Agile programming.
Next Action: Choose and start a title from the list.
So what gets reviewed? During the weekly review, I review the APA lists and the Someday/Maybe lists at their review frequency. I'm likely to review the project support material for active projects. I don't specifically review the Listy Lists, though I'm likely to edit them as part of a weekly review, so they get cleaned up now and then.
What do other people do?
