Hobbies in GTD

[philski]

I've implemented the GTD workflow at work and it's been great so far!

I'm now starting to implement it in my personal life and am having trouble figuring out how to use it for organizing information relating to hobbies and interests. David Allen talks about how there should be clear boundaries between Action Items, Projects (anything with more than one step), References and Someday/Maybe. Take one of my hobbies - powerlifting. Is an article on a new training program part of my powerlifting project? Is it a reference? Or is it a someday/maybe as I'm not doing it now and there's a chance I might never do it?

If I have something self-contained, like a hobby, does it make sense to give it its own workflow (ie: it is a self-contained notebook with next actions, references, etc.) as opposed to the hobby being a subset of an overall workflow?

Thanks,

Philip

 

[Folke]

Take one of my hobbies - powerlifting. Is an article on a new training program part of my powerlifting project? Is it a reference? Or is it a someday/maybe as I'm not doing it now and there's a chance I might never do it?

From your description I'd definitely say the article is reference. And the action itself - to contemplate or to start this program - could be either a Next or a Someday/Maybe action.

I would not consider an ongoing hobby to be a project, though. Sure, its has many steps in it, but it will never be "finished". (From a practical point of view, though, on paper or in an app, you might perhaps use the same tools and mechanisms for it as you would for a project.)

If I have something self-contained, like a hobby, does it make sense to give it its own workflow (ie: it is a self-contained notebook with next actions, references, etc.) as opposed to the hobby being a subset of an overall workflow?

I essentially keep all my actions in one single app. Hobbies are a subset of my life, just like everything else I do. But there can be exceptions:

Things that I do naturally and automatically I normally do not write down at all, nowhere.
Things that require great specialized detail and/or documentation are sometimes better managed in some other system, optimized for that particular purpose. (But it can still be a good idea to have reminders or pointers to it in your main GTD system.)

 

[ArcCaster]

I'd call PowerLifting an area of focus. Projects could include items such as Getting Current with Latest Methods, or Winning a Local Tournament. Action items supporting the project "Getting Current" could include "read article on new training program"

 

[philski]

I would not consider an ongoing hobby to be a project, though. Sure, its has many steps in it, but it will never be "finished". (From a practical point of view, though, on paper or in an app, you might perhaps use the same tools and mechanisms for it as you would for a project.)

I'd call PowerLifting an area of focus. Projects could include items such as Getting Current with Latest Methods, or Winning a Local Tournament. Action items supporting the project "Getting Current" could include "read article on new training program"

Thank you both for your prompt replies. I think I'm getting hung up on the difference between a project and area of focus. Maybe I'm trying too hard to shoehorn everything into GTD.

What about a journal (excel spreadsheet) I update a few times a week? Do you store that within your filing system (as if so, where?)? My interpretation from the book is every file you have (digital or otherwise) falls somewhere in the GTD system so it captures everything.

The lines seem crisp for work projects, but less so for personal activities.

I'll go back and review the areas of focus and projects in the book.

thanks again,

philip

 

[ArcCaster]

my take -- if journaling is a habit, you do not need to bring it into GTD -- same with brushing your teeth, or walking the dog. However, If journaling is not yet a habit, there is a place for it -- a tickler file. Since it is not a daily journal, I'd say write in it today, decide when you want to write in it again, and put the journal into the tickler file for that date.

 

[Folke]

I think I'm getting hung up on the difference between a project and area of focus. Maybe I'm trying too hard to shoehorn everything into GTD.

In a practical sense, the difference may in many respects be negligible. If you keep your stuff on paper, they may both be represented similarly - a sheet with a heading. In a GTD or list app you would typically use the organizational features the app provides. Those "containers" may have all kinds of names, such as lists, folders, projects - but you can usually use them for either purpose. So there is not necessarily much "technical" difference. Many apps even allow you to have at least a few levels of hierarchy.

The difference is more in how you like to think of them. Some are distinctly "finite"; you will check them off one day; and those you call projects. Others are more "permanent", not intended to be completed; they are intended more as a tool for structuring your review work and thinking ahead, keeping related things together. These are the areas of responsibility aka areas of focus. Many do not seem to use them much at all, whereas others use them extensively. I am one of those. I even tend to give them a very literal and meaningful "responsibility" type of definition, almost like an imaginary job title - not just a regular "sorting rule" for "things".

Do you store that within your filing system (as if so, where?)? My interpretation from the book is every file you have (digital or otherwise) falls somewhere in the GTD system so it captures everything.

I'd say your interpretation is absolutely correct. And this then implies - a controversial thought to some, I'm sure - that most of what you have in place and have always done and still do has always been part of your GTD setup, even before the book was written. You have probably kept reference files, action lists etc since you were young, and you have always kept them organized somehow, more or less like GTD. So when you ask the question "Do you store that within your filing system?", and since the obvious objective answer is "of course" (somewhere among all that stuff), the real answer tends to be very person dependent. You probably mean "Do you store that within any of the new parts of your filing system, if any, that you did not have before and which GTD teaches you to use?" or "Do you store that within a specific app that you use as your main task app?". Now, that depends entirely on the person. A journal (log entries etc), which you mention as an example, is something I would definitely not keep in my task app. I would keep it where I keep other related reference or support material for that area or project.

The lines seem crisp for work projects, but less so for personal activities.

Hmm. I am curious. I do not see why. Why would you say that is?

 

[Gardener]

"Is an article on a new training program part of my powerlifting project? Is it a reference? Or is it a someday/maybe as I'm not doing it now and there's a chance I might never do it?"

Possible scenarios for the article:

- You might have a To Read stack. You might toss the article on the stack and, somewhere in your projects and lists, you might have a Keep up with Reading project that that triggers you to look through the stack once in a while.

- Maybe you already read it and want to, someday, think about it. In that case, you'd file it in your Powerlifting Articles folder in your reference filing system, and you'd create a Someday/Maybe item titled "Consider creating program based on article 'Blah' from magazine blah". (That is, enough information to allow you to find the article again.)

- Maybe you read it and are so fired up that you want to do something now. In that case, you'd create a project "Create program based on article 'Blah'..." You'd either file the article in the same place as the previous example, or you'd create a Project Support Material folder and put the article in it.

Re:

"If I have something self-contained, like a hobby, does it make sense to give it its own workflow (ie: it is a self-contained notebook with next actions, references, etc.) as opposed to the hobby being a subset of an overall workflow?"

I have individual hobby-related projects mixed with the rest of my projects. So, "Sewing" isn't a project, but "Sew lightweight travel bathrobe" is. In OmniFocus, that project might be in a Hobbies folder or, if I'm heavily focused on sewing right now, in a Sewing folder.

(Which makes me think of the Areas of Responsibility discussion elsethread. It looks like I don't sort into Areas of Responsibilty, but...would I call it Areas of Activity?)

Re:

"What about a journal (excel spreadsheet) I update a few times a week? Do you store that within your filing system (as if so, where?)? My interpretation from the book is every file you have (digital or otherwise) falls somewhere in the GTD system so it captures everything."

I would probably call the journal itself Project Support Material, and I'd have a repeating action to keep it updated. An ongoing repeating action doesn't fit all that prettily into the project model, but I do have a "project" that just consists of a bunch of independent repeating actions. I guess I could call that project my tickler file and then it would fit in.

 

[OmeWillem]

I'd call PowerLifting an area of focus. Projects could include items such as Getting Current with Latest Methods, or Winning a Local Tournament. Action items supporting the project "Getting Current" could include "read article on new training program"

I'd say you're absolutely right about that.

 

[Folke]

It looks like I don't sort into Areas of Responsibilty, but...would I call it Areas of Activity?

Spot on; you could call it that and still mean roughly the same thing. David Allen himself is not very precise about it. He uses the terms Area of Responsibility and Area of Focus interchangeably, and he might as well have thrown in the term Area of Activity. He points out, though, that the purpose of this is to make it easier to see what is missing from your lists. This is what it boils down to.

I think an important thing to note is that in core GTD (paper GTD) these Areas (20 k) are just represented by a checklist, a "trigger" list, in many ways analogous to the list of projects (10 k), which is also just a kind of checklist. The actions as such you have listed elsewhere.

But this is entirely true only when you use paper or a very "flat" list app. More sophisticated apps (like Omnifocus, MyLifeOrganized, Doit, Nirvana, Things, Asana ...) have a container hierarchy built in, and quite often the names of these container elements do not exactly correspond fully to the terms used by David Allen, nor does the strict hierarchical relationship itself necessarily correspond fully to GTD. If my understanding of Omnifocus is correct, you have an upper level called "folder" and then lower levels of two varieties, called either "project" or "single actions list". In Nirvana, the two latter are termed "sequential project" and "parallel project". In Doit the upper level is called Goal. In MLO, all containers at all levels are called "nodes". None of all this is an exact match to "GTD by the book" (for paper). In many ways, it is often an improvement, but it can also lead users astray.

It would seem that most of us who use a hierarchical app, do use Areas in some way as containers of projects and tasks that fall within a certain "sector of our life". This allows us to review the projects and tasks that are specifically within that sector, and still allows us on a daily basis to view only our next actions or only our waiting for actions etc, across all sectors (or across some wider subset of sectors, e.g Work) when we need that type of perspective.

 

[CJSullivan]

The easy answer is: an Area of Focus is an interest or set of interests that you maintain. A Project may or may not be aligned with an Area of Focus, and it is completed. You don't complete an Area of Focus (although you may decide it's no longer an Area of Focus at some point!)... Hope that helps!

 

[philski]

Thanks for all the responses.

I wrote: "The lines seem crisp for work projects, but less so for personal activities."

Hmm. I am curious. I do not see why. Why would you say that is?

Take one of my hobbies: powerlifting. Some of it is pretty straightforward
- I have unread documents I can put into 'read and review'
- I have read PDF's and files related to training I want to keep. Those are "reference material"
- Training for a particular meet falls under 'projects'
- I don't need to schedule 'next actions' for each trip to the gym because its an engrained habit, but if I wanted to perform a particular action out of the norm I could create a next action.

Where it appears fuzzier for me:
- I have a folder of bookmarks to online articles in Firefox web browser.
+ Do those get filed somewhere in the GTD system, or stay in my web browser?
+ Do you implement GTD in the web browser bookmarks?
- I have an Excel spreadsheet where I plan out my training program and track progress in my training program.
+ It's a project in the sense that it has information for my next action, but there are multiple actions to perform
+ It's reference material in that it has past training cycles
+ It's 'someday/maybe' as the future planning is speculative and subject to change in direction (multiple possible futures)

So where do I store that Excel file in my GTD filesystem? Right now I have it in a 'projects' folder but I know that isn't right.​

Thanks,
Philip

 

[Gardener]

Re:

"Where it appears fuzzier for me:
- I have a folder of bookmarks to online articles in Firefox web browser.
+ Do those get filed somewhere in the GTD system, or stay in my web browser?
+ Do you implement GTD in the web browser bookmarks?"

I would call these reference material or read and review. I realize that you can't store them with the physical and electronic files that you may be storing in the same categories, but I would say that they're functionally the same. If you wanted them all to be in the same place, you could have a file of URLs in both of those places; otherwise, you could just assume that both reference material and read and review will both be stored in two locations--or three: physical files, electronic files, and bookmarks.

Re:

"So where do I store that Excel file in my GTD filesystem? Right now I have it in a 'projects' folder but I know that isn't right."

I'd call this project support material, so that sounds probably right.

 

[Folke]

I agree with Gardener (to a large extent).

It is important to remember that Reference is not a particular place or shelf or manila folder or computer. Reference is just a virtual bucket, an abstraction, a collective term for "all the stuff I think I may want to look at one day", wherever you have decided to keep it. So, bookmarks to web sites, or lists of web sites, lists of books, list of people etc are all reference material, but where you keep this reference material is not really described by GTD (although some general hints are given). It is for you to organize this as you see fit. Even at work you could have reference material in the form of bookmarks to relevant web pages, so there is no real difference between work and private in that regard.

Yes, a "project folder" perhaps, but what if it is not a "project"? Never mind, the Excel sheet it is definitely some sort of reference or support material,whether project related or not. This coudl also happen at work. Say you work in a lab and measure bacterial growth every 2 hours and log the data. It is part of your work, but you do not log those results in your action lists; more likely in an Excel sheet or special lab forms or lab software. What you might want to have on your action lists, though, are reminders to "measure and log bacterial growth data". These actions could be set up as repeating ticklers. But if you remember to do them anyway, if they are almost habitual, then you may not need to keep these actions listed.