High level altitude review

[garce]

Any good suggestions/learning on how to deal with the higher level review (above 10k)?

I was thinking starting from Roles and then start breaking things down. Below just an example of I was thinking about doing:
Planning Higher > 10k
Role 1: Dad (General)
Responsibility 1: Encourage and support physical well being (General)
Duty 1: Assist son with getting better at basketball (Specific / temporal / current)
(Above would be a fraction of a tree, there would many roles, many responsibilities, many duties)

Projects 10k and below
Further breakdown into "how"
Project 1: Buy basketball shoes
Project 2: Research about good basketball drills
Operational work 1: Spend 1 hour twice a week practicing basketball (straight into calendar)

For Planning, I was planning to use some type of mindmapping tool (recommendations are appreciated)
For Projects (next actions, waiting for, etc), I was planning to use outlook tasks
I was considering to mentally connect "Planning" with "Projects" only during weekly reviews and without necessarily trying to nest Projects under a planning entry. It is very likely there is not always 1-1 relationship and I also would rather avoid spending so much time maintaining

Appreciate any feedback on whether this makes/doesnt make sense and alternative approaches. Thanks

LAST EDITED 11/11 1:34PM EST

 

[notmuch]

This is heavily dependent on your GTD tool. You may want to edit your post to include your tool(s)... that will improve the usefulness of responses.

 

[Folke]

I agree with notmuch that it depends a lot on what app (or paper tools) you are using.

But what I would like to share with you here is that I find it very useful - and easy - to map up to 30k (maybe 40 k; I do not distinguish between those) in a hierarchy, but there are some comments I need to make about that:

At 30 k we have three kinds of things (according to my interpretation):
- completable "super-projects", in other words extra big, long-term, important objectives, e.g. "Move to Brazil"
- "super-areas" (groups of AoRs/AoFs) e.g. Private, Business, Non-Profit
- various skills goals, personality goals etc - e.g. become fluent in French - these do not usually lend themeselves to a hierarchical representation as they often cut across many "super-projects" and "super-areas" (you can get to practice your French in many types of situations).

The first two of the above I have represented as the top level containers in my app (called Goals in my app), and I do my weekly reviews one such bucket at a time. In each top level bucket there are projects, and under the projects there are actions, and under the actions there are sub-actions. (Different apps use different terminology.) Actions that do not actually belong to a project I keep in a "false project" that I use as an "area container". I have about 10-12 areas (AoRs), hence 10-12 such false projects. I keep these "area containers" at the same level as the real projects (actually using the app's Project feature for them).

The third type above (skill goals etc), as well as 50k life values etc, I cannot "integrate" into a system. I see no other (good) solution than the standard GTD solution to just keep them listed somewhere and review them occasionally. (I have played with the thought of using tags for identifying actions that would be particularly conducive to some particular higher-level goal, but have never really gotten around to implementing any such thing. I does not seem to be worth the effort.)

 

[notmuch]

I think your plan to disconnect the two makes sense for exactly the reasons you stated.

I use WorkFlowy for virtually all my GTD lists. With it, I can nest lists within lists within lists, but I don't in this situation. I like to keep the higher altitudes separate from the runway.

btw, WorkFlowy is the best planning/brainstorming app I've ever used... it fits my brain type. If you are looking for mind mapping tools it's worth a look. It isn't a traditional graphical mind mapper, but a web app outliner that is an absolute joy to use. YMMV.

 

[garce]

I read the comments when posted but neglected to say thanks. They were very useful and today I came back to re-read this. Thanks
I checked workflowy and it looks amazingly flexible. I am signing up

 

[garce]

After reviewing workflowy decided that I didn't want to pay monthly (their free tier is very limited). I found dynalist that seem to very comparable (and doesnt have a limit number of entries). Dynalist does not have a smartphone app yet, you could use it through your smartphone browser though. App is on the works.