I have a Not Yet file, which is between someday/maybe and active. These are projects I definitely want to do, but I don't cant do immediately. Often its because I don't have time, sometimes we wont have the money right now, or I cant do it because its the wrong time of year. I got the idea from GTD fast where its referred to as SDMB soon and SDMB later. Seemed easier to rename that.
When I do the weekly review I check through and see if anything needs to be brought forward. Unlike the somday/maybe I check the Not Yet list each week as carefully as the project list. The SDMB list just gets checked every few weeks, and more carefully once a month.
I did it for two reasons. one is that my SDMB list was becoming very long and blurred - some long term goals, some idle dreams, some things that I needed to do within the year. I don't need to be reminded that I want to learn Spanish every week. So when the weekly review came I would often skip over it because I knew there were 50 irrelevant topics for that week.
The other reason is that if I kept all the things I wanted to do here as active projects with NAs, I'd either move them all along very very slowly, or I'd be constantly looking past dozens of NAs week after week that never changed, which would just annoy me in the end.
In my latest job I was charged with turning around a charity that had basically been neglected for the past 5 years and so within a month I identified enough work to last me a few years. However you look at it, there are things that need doing ahead of others. Its just that those others need to be done in the end.
I wanted to have a mechanism where I could check things at the project level without wasting time making next actions. At first I made all my projects live and would just not do them if it didnt seem fit, but the trouble is the world around me changed. What was the NA on a project one week suddenly isnt the NA the following week. The phone call to that guy doesn't matter anymore because someone else contacted me. Contacting the local government one week becomes taking advice from a solicitor the next, due to something that I learned in between. Arranging a meeting with my colleagues doesnt need doing, because we arranged one for something else and can add this item to the agenda.
I realised that I was wasting time week after week writing up the next actions for projects that were never getting done, because I couldn't leave them indefinitely. If I left something for 4 weeks, Id do 4 weekly reviews, maybe rewrite the actions twice. Times that by 20 projects, that a lot of effort for zero output.
So in the end I came up with this compromise that seems to work fairly well.
The only problem is that I might miss small opportunities to move those projects on because the NA isnt defined. Thats a trade off that cant be avoided. When I do the weekly review I try and made sure there's a nice range of projects and next actions. So if all my NAs are heavy all-day jobs, I'll bring forward a dozen smaller projects and put NAs on them so theres a range of things to do. Its not ideal, but then the system cant match the complexity of life, and that trade off suits me better than having all those projects live, or in SDMB.
