jpm said:
While GTD goes much farther than anyone to determine what the next action is, no personal planning system that I've found allows you to track the resource critical path of a project.
If your projects are huge and have an extremely complicated critical path (enterprise-level stuff), don't you need project planning software? Enterprise-level projects go beyond what you can expect from a "personal planning system."
However, for reasonably complicated personal-level projects with multiple dependencies, say "Remodel house," I'm happy with the capabilities of Life Balance (e.g., hierarchical planning, sequential dependencies). I have to think carefully about how to organize my project according to these features -- some outlines work better than others. But I imagine this is true of any tool. Once I have organized the project, tasks show up in their proper context lists, and appropriate review-level questions show up in their proper context lists. I've been able to organize and review multi-year-level projects.
fncll said:
I was talking about sequential, dependent items. Almost all of the projects I work on have items which have to be done in sequence... I was wondering where people were keeping their lists of actions which can't yet be accomplished and making them simply available for movement to the proper context when the previous action is complete.
Someone really needs to write a GTD application.
It's been done. I feel like a broken record here, but Life Balance does this easily with the "complete subtasks in order" scheduling feature. You never have to manually check to see if a Next Action listed under a project appears in the proper context list; set it up once, in a natural planning way (outline), and you're set. Tasks do not appear on your context list until necessary prerequisite tasks are completed. And any task can be assigned to any context list, which can include, or be included in, other contexts as well. Yet the "big picture" plan of the project is clear in the outline view of the project.
Also, parent tasks (such as a project outcome) don't show on context lists until all child tasks are complete. This works great to help you know when you need to define a new next action, when you can't plan all the steps until you know results from previous ones. To be sure I recognize an item as an undoable project when it shows up, I use a standard form, e.g., "?Data collection software complete?" When this shows up on my list @Office, I immediately know that it's not done, but all subtasks are complete, so I need to switch to outline view and decide my next action. I don't need to wait for a Weekly Review to catch this.
-andersons
