Is there a better way to organize rectangular aligned projects?

[Cpu_Modern]

Let's just jump in with a concrete and simple example:

I started to write a blog on a variety of topics of interest. Each of these topics could be an Area of Focus or not, but all of them generate a bunch of reserach projects. In other words I have a several topics I want to learn about and maybe publish blog posts on. So, several writing projects really.

This is all nice and neat, but here is the problem: I also have a general project (or goal, or aim, or want) to publish at least one blog post per a given cadence, say, a week. Regardless of topic. So this goal seems to be a form of meta-project being 90 degrees aligned to all those topical projects.

What is the best way to organize this?

 

[Folke]

I'd venture this approach: The best way to organize this goal is to not organize it. All you really need is a reminder to "select this week's topic", "write this week's post" etc. You could put these almost anywhere in your system, or, if you have an Area for "administrator" type stuff, you could put it there.

 

[jenkins]

Are you asking for the best way to organize this mentally, or physically, or both?

My gut instinct is that each topic of interest is like a sub-set of an area of focus. For example, one of your "roles" might be "blogger." Within that role, you have many areas of focus, e.g., web design, promotion, networking, research, and perhaps "writing topics" is an area of focus in itself, which might include science, technology, art, history, etc. You could then keep this list as a mind-map or outline you review every month or so to spark new ideas and make sure nothing is falling through the cracks.

I think that writing one blog post per week is not really a project since it's never really "done." I also hesitate to categorize it as a goal. It's more like a standard you've set for yourself within your role. It's something you want to turn into a habit (or maybe another way of thinking about it is you have a goal to turn writing one blog post per week into a habit). Which makes me think it's fit for a checklist, at least until the habit is ingrained. Put it in front of yourself as often as you need to change your behavior, and then you can slowly back it off, until it's just a part of your higher-level horizons, which might be phrased slightly differently as "I value blogging frequently and consistently in order to hone my skills as a writer and appropriately provide my readers with fresh yet thoughtful content." And if you review that once a quarter or once a year, and you realize "I'm not aligning myself with my higher-level purpose/principles," you adapt your system again.

What do you think about that?

 

[Gardener]

I feel the desire for one or two more examples, because my response to the blogging example would be very specific to that example, and I think you're looking for something more general.

 

[Cpu_Modern]

It's more like a standard you've set for yourself within your role. It's something you want to turn into a habit

What do you think about that?

Role? Habit? I think this is an infiltrator from another camp! Sound the alarms!!

All kidding aside...

I think your advice is excellent and very in line with what I hoped to recieve here. Thank you for that. I added it in the proposed way to my outline in which I keep my "higher level" stuff and the projects list. (I do see my 20k landscape multi-layered anyway.)

My problem is still not solved 100% yet.

First, the goal (or standard) for my posting frequency stems from a higher-level vision for where I want the blog to be in a few years. I figured that one of the important things I have to do to reach that goal is to post often enough (Duh, I know). So this goal is in support of higher items, that's why I ended up seeing it as a project.

Second, if I keep it as a project, then the project plan is the place where I can write down this standard for a posting frequency. That then would explain why I have all those deadlines for blogposts in that project plan (or at least one deadline for the next post).

If I understand you correctly, with your proposal I would end up with a project for the next post which gets generated when I check the checklist. Is that correct?

My only problem whith that is that per "standard GTD" the project plan is the place for storing "principles and standards", not a checklist. How can I have this solved, while having all these purpose statements, outcome visions etc in project plans and not anywhere else?

 

[Cpu_Modern]

I'd venture this approach: The best way to organize this goal is to not organize it. All you really need is a reminder to "select this week's topic", "write this week's post" etc.

I like your "minimalism" here. However what is missing here for me is a place where I would put the purpose statement and definition of why I have this task of writing a blog post per week in the first place. If it's a project, it goes in the project plan. If all I have is the blog Area (or admin Area) the no such place exists.

 

[Cpu_Modern]

@Gardener:

I could only come up with one other concrete example from my life (where I feel this pain.)

A few online forums where I post frequently. You know how it is. Is a thread a project? Is checking the forums an Area of Focus? Sometimes threads are very vivid on one day and the wither off quickly. Other threads remain active for longer and it is possible to leave them untoched for a week or so and come back later to them, and so on. How would you organize forums threads?

 

[mcogilvie]

A few online forums where I post frequently. You know how it is. Is a thread a project? Is checking the forums an Area of Focus? Sometimes threads are very vivid on one day and the wither off quickly. Other threads remain active for longer and it is possible to leave them untoched for a week or so and come back later to them, and so on. How would you organize forums threads?

I don't want to shatter anyone's self-esteem, but reading forum posts is recreation for me. No tracking whatsoever.

 

[Folke]

... what is missing here for me is a place where I would put the purpose statement and definition of why I have this task ...

To make a long story short, for me it goes like this: Up to a point I can organize things hierarchically, with comments, in my app. This goes for subtasts, tasks, projects and "goals" (which I use more like a "folder" för an "area group" or "super project" etc). Above that, there are "permeative" goals that can affect any project or area, for which a hierarchical representation therefore is not applicable. For these I have no natural place in my app.

I am not sure if I have understood your situation with the blog, but here is a sketch of how I might have tried to deal with it:

- determine at the "folder" level where the blog goes (e.g. business, private etc, or possibly a "new venture" folder)
- within that folder, use the "project" mechanism to create a task container for Blog (but prefix the container such that you can easily see that this is not actually a completable project, but acually an "area"; I keep one such area container for each one of my dozen-odd areas, and this is where I put miscellaneous actions that belong to that area)
- write your reminder tasks ("write this week's post" etc) within that "project" (i.e. the blogger area container)
- write your goals, reasons, aspirations etc in the comments of those three items (three levels), depending on where they belong. Most of the things you mentioned I would put at the "Blog" container level. But if you want to describe how the blog fits in with your other efforts (e.g. book sales) in the same larger area, e.g. business, then the folder level is where I would put those particular comments.

 

[Oogiem]

Interesting problem. I have similar projects.

I actually have one almost the same for blog posts. What I'm starting to do is I have a Scrivener document that contains sections for each blog I wish to write for. Within that section I have all the various topics I am considering. Some might have research items stored in Scrivener but most of them the research items are in either DEVONThink or on my main hard drive if electronic and in a paper folder if hard copy. Within my GTD Task management system I have multiple projects. Once is a recurring project of Blogs all up to date and I have a series of steps that I do that are the action set sequential of Draft, Edit and finally post a blog entry. The project reoccurs on whatever frequency level I want to set. I see it as that particular one is an instance of a project that is similar in nature to many other projects but is itself distinct and can be finished. These recurring projects, of which I have many, live in larger folders in Omnifocus. Once is for things that happen monthly or weekly, the other 4 are for things that occur once a year but happen in specific seasons and are almost all farm related.

So I will be looking at my context list for Scrivener (I have a context for most of the major apps I work in because it's so jarring to switch apps) and I'll see that for example right now I have several tasks. One is Draft blog post, another is draft chapter in my book, another is update LambTracker documentation about lambing, another is Test putting SQL queries into GitHub via Scrivener. So today it's raining, we've already had 2 ewes lamb this morning and I have about an hour before I have to go out and check again. If I wasn't here on the forums writing this post I could be in Scrivener working on one of those actions.

Say I do that and draft the blog post, I then go on to work on my book until I hit a good stopping point. I decide to go back and see if I need to do any editing of the blog post because I'm still in Scrivener. I find a few typos, fix them and decide it's good to go. I move the text to my posted blogs section in that Scrivener document and go post it on the appropriate blog. By then it's probably time to go check the sheep, assume nothing is happening so I come back in and check my lists. I look at the Scrivener context because I know I just completed some stuff in there. I quickly click off the actions in OF of the recurring project Blogs up to date because I finished it. Immediately a new copy of the project becomes active. Since I have it set to restart 2 weeks after completion I don't need to do anything more and I don't see the actions yet. It will just come up in time. But say I want to continue on in Scrivener, I may pick the testing action because I am fresh and I figure it's going to take me about an hour to do the testing.

When I do my weekly review I may get to the Blogs all up to date and I may not remember what and when I did stuff. So I look at the Scrivener document to see what's done and what I can still work on. Perhaps one of the topics is going to need a bit more detailed research and it pulls me this week so I may make a separate project to just do the research part and come up with the next appropriate action. For example, one topic I want to write on is sheep related gods and godesses. I know that that is a full project because many different cultures have sheep deities. So a research question is to google about deities that are related to sheep. I may generate a bunch of actions, for example I know that over time there were several sheep or ram gods in ancient Egypt and I may want to learn more about each one. So I can capture several project out of that initial one if I feel it's necessary.

Do keep in mind that I hate sub-projects. I like to keep my projects small even though in many cases there may be several projects related to one overall goal. Some folks like to keep the goal as the project, and then all the pieces under it as sub-projects but I found that confusing and drustrating to review so I split them all up into multiple projects. Also keep in mind that I am most comfortable with a lot of choices on my lists and generally work in roughly 3 month sections.

My weekly review and in-depth quarterly reviews are where I pull all the pieces together for the larger picture.

 

[Cpu_Modern]

Oogiem, thank you for your answer! What I definitely like whith your approach is how each blog post is a project. If I keep it this way, the purpose statement and with it the governing principle that states the desired posting frequency can be stored in the project plan of the "Blogs all up to date" project. That could be the solution. I will ponder this.

On another note, I find it interesting that you store your blog posts in your local files library aswell. That would make sense if you write for blogs of other people, but if you control the blog you would have a backup of your entire blog and within it your posts. For now I decided I will just search my blog if I want to retrieve something there and not a local copy.

Can you comment on the pros and cons of that and your experience with it?

 

[Cpu_Modern]

@Folke:
Yeah, while I am a fan of multi-layered Areas/Goals structures, what I meant by place was definitely a project plan with it's purpose statement etc. The question is how can I slice all this up in a way that makes that possible?

I think what you wrote in your first post is akin to what Oogiem wrote with her recurring project. I will end somewhere there, I guess.

@mcogilvie:
Thank you for your input.

 

[Oogiem]

On another note, I find it interesting that you store your blog posts in your local files library aswell. That would make sense if you write for blogs of other people, but if you control the blog you would have a backup of your entire blog and within it your posts. For now I decided I will just search my blog if I want to retrieve something there and not a local copy.

Can you comment on the pros and cons of that and your experience with it?

First off I do occcasionally write for a blog I do not control. But that is not the reason I maintain a backup.

I am very cloud adverse. I do not have full control over the server where my web sites are hosted, they are on a hosting service provider's machines. Therefore I always keep a backup copy of all content on a machine I am in total control of as a backup. In fact I keep several backups in different places and on different types of media. I have had too many instances of needing to get back to old data I created years ago. I just filled a request for some files that were created back in 1998 and 1999. They are long since deleted off the server where they used to be. But I still had my copy. I have regularly updated the content newer versions of the software used to create it and moved the files with byte verification to prevent corruption to new backup media whenever I changed media types. Originally they were on bernoulli drives, then WORM optical drives, then zip drives, now on both CD-ROMs and hard drives. The files are just as useful now as they were then. Plus for blog posts, I don't want to talk about the same subject to frequently so I look at what I've done recently before deciding what the next topic will be.

 

[Folke]

what I meant by place was definitely a project plan with it's purpose statement etc. The question is how can I slice all this up in a way that makes that possible?

If I were you, and if I had used the setup described in my last post, I would put all that in the comment field to the Blog "project" container - i.e. the purpose of the blog, types of topical areas you want to cover, etc ...

Within (under) the blog "project" container I would put the action reminders to "write this week's blog post" etc. In the notes to the task I might write a few bullets outlining the post and I would summarize that in the task's title as well. Quite likely I would also add one or more separate Someday tasks serving as checklists (brainstormed lists) of possible future blog posts.

Only if I really needed to elaborate on the interplay between the blogging and my other types of work, e.g. book sales, internet marketing as a whole etc, would I add anthing much in the comment to the "folder" level container (above the Blog "project). (And if I did not have this higher folder level in my app, I could easily live without it - just prefix all my projects more carefully).

 

[Gardener]

First off I do occcasionally write for a blog I do not control. But that is not the reason I maintain a backup.

I am very cloud adverse. I do not have full control over the server where my web sites are hosted, they are on a hosting service provider's machines. Therefore I always keep a backup copy of all content on a machine I am in total control of as a backup. In fact I keep several backups in different places and on different types of media. I have had too many instances of needing to get back to old data I created years ago. I just filled a request for some files that were created back in 1998 and 1999. They are long since deleted off the server where they used to be. But I still had my copy. I have regularly updated the content newer versions of the software used to create it and moved the files with byte verification to prevent corruption to new backup media whenever I changed media types. Originally they were on bernoulli drives, then WORM optical drives, then zip drives, now on both CD-ROMs and hard drives. The files are just as useful now as they were then. Plus for blog posts, I don't want to talk about the same subject to frequently so I look at what I've done recently before deciding what the next topic will be.

Hmm. This brings me back to a thought that I had a few months ago, then mostly dropped: Backups on paper.

I write bits of things all the time, but most of the things that I've written since I got my first hard drive years and years ago are lost. Oh, they may exist on various ancient hard drives or laptops around the house, but odds are that I will never get around to trying to extract them.

But some of my writing before the hard drive era IS preserved, because back then I could only back up to floppies, and I didn't trust floppies. So I printed things and put them in binders.

The thought I had a few month ago was to start printing things out and putting them in binders. I'm going to give that a try.

Plus, a few months ago I shifted most of my scribbling on paper from random notebooks to a hard-bound lab notebook, on the theory that the (lab) notebook will still be around, instead of lost like the (random) notebooks. I'm approaching the end of the first notebook, and about to buy a new one.

Now, this all involves the risk of becoming a paper hoarder. But I don't think that it will pile up too quickly, especially if I keep things sufficiently organized that I can throw out "drafts" and replace them with new drafts, rather than potentially printing the same thing multiple times.

 

[Oogiem]

Hmm. This brings me back to a thought that I had a few months ago, then mostly dropped: Backups on paper

Not a bad option at all. I still have some of my old FORTRAN programs that only still exist because I printed out the source code. The originals were on punch cards which have long since vanished but the printouts have survived. And yes, they are still useful to me so I really do need to resurrect them.

 

[TesTeq]

Not a bad option at all. I still have some of my old FORTRAN programs that only still exist because I printed out the source code. The originals were on punch cards which have long since vanished but the printouts have survived. And yes, they are still useful to me so I really do need to resurrect them.

Unfortunately my software is totally obsolete after 20 years. No platforms to run, no reason to convert or rewrite.

 

[Oogiem]

Unfortunately my software is totally obsolete after 20 years. No platforms to run, no reason to convert or rewrite.

Mine was for solving the differential equations used in making genetic calculations. Not much has changed since the 70's. My biggest issue is that stuff was written in FORTRAN 4 and some in FORTRAN 77 and I need to covert to a complete new language or build a GUI wrapper over the top of it.