Defining project

[dims85]

Hello GTD enthusiasts!

I have just had a first read to the latest GTD book and I am thrilled to get started applying the method. I am trying to use mainly Evernote on Laptop, iPad and Phone to synch most of my activities. My question is the following.

I have some problem to determine how to organise projects. The concept of project list is clear. However, what is not clear to me is what sort of other project related information I should keep, where and how to organise them. Say that you have a project list with 70 different projects and then associated "next action" ordered by context (@home, @work laptop, etc.). Should I have a similar breakdown of projects say (project @work, projects @home, etc). If that is the case, should I create subfolders for each project (Project @Home contains project 'Gardening' and so on)? Isnt that too verbose? What information should be contained in the project folders if I create them (breakdown of the projects or additional info and references)? And how is that different from next action?

I will probably read once again the book since still I have many open question but a bit of help from Veterans GTD practitioners would be much appreciated! A perfect answer to my question would be to see how some of you have organised their own GTD environment with one example, but I do understand that might be a bit too much to ask .

Looking forward to your answers,
Marco

 

[Gardener]

It sounds like you're trying to apply contexts down at the action level, and then up at the project-grouping level. I don't think that the same list of "contexts" will work for that.

This is partly because even if a project is ABOUT "home", many of its actions may happen somewhere other than home. To decorate your house, you may meet with a decorator at their office, go to the hardware store for paint, take a trip to whichever of the Carolinas it is where they make all the furniture, make phone calls from wherever you may be with your phone, and so on. Contexts are about the resources (sometimes a place, sometimes people, sometimes tools, etc.) that you need for an action, rather than the part of your life that the project is meant to serve.

Also, contexts are used to help you when you're choosing an action in the moment--Example: "I have ten minutes with my phone; what calls are pending?" Your organization of project groups is a larger view--you use it when you're organizing your whole system, when you're doing your weekly review, and so on. You also use it when you're adding new actions, so I'm not saying that it's OK for them to be hard to get into, just that the purposes are different.

How you organize your projects is dependent on your personal preferences, but also on your tool. I use OmniFocus, so I can have folders of projects (or folders within folders within folders if I want to). It sounds like EverNote has fewer options for hierarchical organization.

Now, I don't use much of that hierarchical organization. In the past, I had (as just one example of part of my hierarchical structure) a folder for Hobbies, and below that a subfolder for Sewing and another one for Gardening. Then I just had the folder for Hobbies, with all of the Hobby projects underneath it. Today, the entire structure for my personal system (my work system is on my work computer) looks like:

Inbox
Project: Single Actions.
Project: Repeaters
Folder: Little Projects
Folder: Big Projects

That's it. Little Projects and Big Projects just have projects under them, rather than another layer of hierarchy. It turns out that the "little" and "big" distinction is useful for me, while the other hierarchies were just clutter.

The two projects at the top are essentially lists--one for single actions that don't require a project, and another for repeating single actions that don't require a project. (Example: I have a weekly action for "fill weekly dietary supplement box")

You ask about "additional info and references"--I would see that as project support material. I wouldn't store it in my project/action lists, I'd store it somewhere else, like in the A-Z filing system.

 

[Popoye]

Say that you have a project list with 70 different projects and then associated "next action" ordered by context (@home, @work laptop, etc.). Should I have a similar breakdown of projects say (project @work, projects @home, etc).

[FONT=verdana, geneva, sans-serif]Some like to organize their Projects list by broader categories also called Areas of Focus/Responsabilies in the book. [/FONT]For example, a very simple (and 'high-level') categorization could be : Personal Projects vs. Work Projects. But you don't organize your project by context because some projects will require several contexts throughout their completion.

[FONT=verdana, geneva, sans-serif]Your NA (next actions) should be on your Next Actions list and organized by context (@home, @office, @computer)[/FONT]
Both your personal NA and your work NA should be on y[FONT=verdana, geneva, sans-serif]our Next Actions list. Eventually you can use 2 separate Next Actions lists if you find it easier, one dedicated to your personal NA and the other for your work NA.[/FONT]

What information should be contained in the project folders if I create them (breakdown of the projects or additional info and references)?

[FONT=verdana, geneva, sans-serif]All the information needed to complete the project is what we call 'Project Support Material'. So in your project folder you could have various things including emails, phone numbers, notes of potential ideas, documents, important communications, project plan and schedule, ...[/FONT]

And how is that different from next action?

[FONT=verdana, geneva, sans-serif]A next action is just the next physical activity that you have to do in order to move your project forward.[/FONT]
A project is anything that you want to do and that requires more than one action step.

 

[dims85]

Hello and thank to you both Gardener and Popoye! I think I understand a bit better now. To be honest, I ended up downloading OmniFocus on my Mac+iPad and things are quite clear there. The projects, their associated next actions, context etc. Pretty brilliant!

Thanks once again

 

[GTD-Sweden]

Omnifocus rules😀

 

[Oogiem]

I have some problem to determine how to organise projects. The concept of project list is clear. However, what is not clear to me is what sort of other project related information I should keep, where and how to organise them. Say that you have a project list with 70 different projects and then associated "next action" ordered by context (@home, @work laptop, etc.). Should I have a similar breakdown of projects say (project @work, projects @home, etc). If that is the case, should I create subfolders for each project (Project @Home contains project 'Gardening' and so on)? Isnt that too verbose? What information should be contained in the project folders if I create them (breakdown of the projects or additional info and references)? And how is that different from next action?

I used to sort projects into larger buckets based on my areas of focus but I found that it was more confusing than helpful because most of my projects could fit into one or more AOFs. Now I just keep projects in one place. I use Omnifocus so I have a folder called active projects and within that are all teh current active projects I am working on. I also have a folder for recurring projects and one for recurring projects in each season (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun etc) There is a last folder for Someday/Maybe projects that are on hold. This is where projects I have started go if I need to stop work on them for a while.

Project support material in my system is stored in one of 4 places:
small notes are stored in the notes section of the project description (I use Omnifocus for my lists so it's easy to add a note to a project title) I keep this to less than a paragraph.

slightly larger amounts of electronic support material are stored in my note taking tool, DEVONThink, in a folder/group called Active Projects with a folder for each project. These notes will sync to my iPhone and iPad and I try to reserve this for things that are short and that I want to work on in many places.

larger electronic documents are in a folder on my main computer called Active_Projects with a sub folder inside for each project.

Paper support material will be in a paper folder that lives in my active projects drawer in my filing cabinet.

So for example right now I have a project Re-Design the Sheep Sweep. In Omnifocus I have a brief note under that project that there are project support materials on paper, in large electronic form and in DT. The paper materials consist of a book by Dr. Temple Grandin on designing livestock handling facilities, some aerial pictures of our barnyard where the current sweep is, some scaled drawings of potential configurations for changes, the catalog of handling system pieces from the company that made out existing system and an inventory of what pieces we have. The electronic folder contains several PDF documents about designing sheep chutes and handling systems from the UK and from Australia and the pictures of our system and pieces. My DEVONThink note has links to a bunch of you tube videos of both Grandin style chutes and Bud Box configurations for handling sheep and a quick note about critical factors for us. The project re-design sheep sweep has several actions defined in OF but the current next action is calling a contractor to discuss adding an extra wing on the south side of the tractor shed to provide shade over the proposed new location of the system.