The Distinction Between Active and Inactive Projects

It's a good concept but I probably wouldn't talk about it in quite these terms.

GTD: "I define a 'project' as any outcome you're committed to achieving that will take more than one action step to complete." (Emphasis is mine.)

In contrast, Someday/Maybe is for "things you're not sure you want to commit to."

In this sense, all projects are 'active' projects. Anything on a Someday/Maybe list is not a project.

But things need to be called something, and if the terminology works for you, that's fine.
 
I found that my focus increased greatly when I made it wickedly simple to put a project on hold when I know I won't have anything to do on it for at least a week.

My projects on hold are housed in my Someday list with a #℠Started tag (I differentiate between Someday and Maybe items) and an accompanying trigger to reactivate the project when I can do something again. I'm still currently committed to completing these projects but I don't need to see them in any reviews this week.

Appreciate your perspective as always.
Clayton.

Small things done consistently in strategic places have major impact.
 
Roger said:
What happens to all the Next Actions that are associated with a project when you put it "on hold"?
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The key phrase is:
when I know I won't have anything to do on it for at least a week

This means there are no current next actions on this project. They are future actions. Waiting for items stay in that list.
I have a context Future Actions that can house actions related to a project that are not available to be done at this point in the project (tagged with the project tag so they can be viewed when reviewing the project).

Hope this helps.
Clayton.
 
I have quite a free flow between my projects list and Someday/Maybe, and a list of questions that help me decide during my weekly review.

- [x] Did I make progress on this project last week?
- [x] What will I have time to do next week?
- [x] Does it matter if this project never gets done?
- [x] Should any of these projects be merged?
- [x] Do my projects help me move towards my higher horizons?

When I move a project to Someday/Maybe, I am renegotiating with myself, letting go of any obligation to that project other than to reconsider next weekly review. The fact that I might have started working on it previously does not give it any special status in my system. There is no reason that an incomplete project would necessarily be more important to my future self than anything else.
 
About the closest thing I see in GTD for this is in the discussion around "Using the Calendar for Future Options", which details one of those uses as "Triggers for activating projects". The process is: "When the day arrives, you see the reminder and insert the item as an active project on your 'Projects' list."

I find it helps my thinking around these sorts of topics when I have a specific concrete example in mind, and I think a good one here is: "File taxes for 2025."

That's going to have several Next Actions, so it'll someday be a real live active project. And I'm probably not any better off looking at it sitting there inertly every Weekly Review for the next months and months, although the actual waste there is probably on the order of seconds, so I may not care all that much.

On the other other hand, thinking about taxes can be a bit like thinking about the dead batteries in your flashlight while you're sitting in the dark -- by the time the paperwork starts rolling in, it can be too late (or at least, suboptimal timing) to do anything useful about it.

This might make the most sense in terms of horizons, with an Area of Focus being Finances, and Taxes being a sub-area of that. We probably want to review an Area of Focus like that, what? Every month? Every couple months? Something like that. And if we're giving some thought to our Taxes every month or two, maybe we don't really need an additional reminder to activate that project about filing our taxes.

Still, there's nothing wrong with a bit of a belt-and-suspenders level of redundancy and defense-in-depth on some of these things, particularly around open loops that we really don't want to fumble, like filing our taxes. As long as we get to that point where we trust, not hope, that we're going to get our taxes filed, exactly how we got there might not matter too much.

Great, right? Well... now that I've been writing for a while, I feel like I have other concerns, but it's sort of a different topic, so maybe I'll just start another post.
 
Dave Edwards said:
When one of my coaching clients tells me that they have 'too many projects, '...
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Okay, so this! "I have too many projects." What the heck does that mean?

It could mean a lot of different things. I can take some guesses.

I'm pretty sure it means a bit more than it first appears. The reason I say this is because the suggested solution -- dividing projects up into Active Projects and Inactive Projects -- cannot possibly solve the issue of having too many projects. The number of projects hasn't changed! So there must be something else going on.

So I'll take a few guesses at how to complete this sentence: "I have too many projects, and this is a problem for me because..."

1. "...I can't review them all during my Weekly Review." My hunch is that this is the most common complaint. My next diagnostic question here would be: "Okay -- how long did your last Weekly Review take?"

If the answer is anything less than two hours, then we've found their real problem, and it is: they're not scheduling enough time for their Weekly Review. There are several ways to address that problem, and none of them involve inactivating projects.

If the answer is considerably more than two hours, then my follow-up would be: "How long did just the review of your projects take?"

This is important because the Weekly Review has a number of things on the agenda, of which reviewing the projects is just one. If someone is taking 90 minutes just to review their Next Actions lists, then probably something needs to be done about that.

But maybe it really is exactly the review of the Projects that's taking up 90 minutes! The question then becomes: Okay, so why is that taking so long? How long is a single review of a single project taking, and why?

"'File 2025 taxes' -- I don't need to worry about that for several months. Next." That takes mere seconds! So I'm not sure I really believe that getting it off the list really helps enough to generally solve this sort of problem. It might not hurt, sure.

"'Get the oil changed in my car' -- oh yeah, hmmm. I was going to call and schedule that. I haven't done that yet. Is that still on one of my Next Action lists? I hope so..." This is somewhat legit, but I'll suggest that it can be streamlined by re-arranging the agenda of the Weekly Review, as presented in GTD, slightly -- do the reviews of Next Action Lists and Waiting For Lists before the review of Projects. My guess here is that by default we might expect the average practitioner to be elbow-deep in those lists all the time every day, so they're already well-known by the time we get to Weekly Review. But if this is the problem, then sure, re-arrange things a bit. Shouldn't take long. "Oil change -- call to schedule, as soon as possible. Next."

And while we're at it -- guess what else is on the agenda for Weekly Review? That's right -- Review Someday/Maybe. So that should be a pretty good clue that moving something from the Projects list to the Someday/Maybe list isn't going to save any time.

"'Plan a birthday party for Mom' -- oh yeah... I wonder what she wants to do, if anything. Maybe just a small party. I could get it catered..." I bet this one happens a lot too. This is not the right time to start wading into doing Project Planning for anything. It's a great time to notice that you need to do some Project Planning and to add that as a Next Action for a project. Even outside of Weekly Reviews, where it merely surfaces, I suspect "holy crap I've got so much project planning to do on all these unplanned projects" is behind a number of "too many projects" complaints.

Okay, that's probably enough for Weekly Review. When else do we touch our Projects List?

2. "...it just seems like a lot of these important projects are not moving forward." This is a pretty advanced insight, I think, and exactly the sort of thing that so much of GTD is designed to uncover. A common cause is over-commitment -- oh, why did I volunteer to do so many things?? The good news is that we've never been better-equipped to re-negotiate our commitments. This can take the form of inactivating a project, but I think for a lot of people that's an unusual step. "Mom's a grown woman -- she can plan her own dang birthday party." But it's vitally-important work to do, when it needs to be done.

3. "...I feel like I've lost sense of my priorities." I suspect this is pretty closely related to the scenario I've described above. Perhaps a less-traumatic way to phrase that is "Hmmm, right this moment, am I making the best use of my time by doing what I'm doing? I should take a look at the Projects list... wow is it long!" Which, again, could happen, but really, how many minutes could that possibly take someone? And will shoving a bunch of things onto a different list of Projects really help, or will it make it worse?

The keen students of GTD will, of course, recognize these 3 scenarios as the three times when the Projects horizon should be engaged with, as described in Making It All Work.

That's it. All the rest of the time, it isn't directly relevant how long the Projects list is. You're not engaging with it then.

Okay, that's not quite true -- there's also Project Planning, which I touched on earlier. Planning a Project takes a certain amount of time, and "I have too many unplanned projects!" is a pretty sensible thing to worry about. The good news is that it's well-understood how to resolve that. "Next Action -- brainstorm ideas for Mom's birthday party." Now there's something pinning down that open loop. Now I'll feel just a bit less stressed-out every time I see that on the Projects list. Now it'll take me seconds to handle during the Weekly Review.


Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. Maybe Dave will have some further ideas.
 
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Roger said:
I find it helps my thinking around these sorts of topics when I have a specific concrete example in mind, and I think a good one here is: "File taxes for 2025."
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I like this as a concrete example. When I think of upcoming taxes usually occurs near the end of the year. I might toss that into the inbox, process it and do the Natural Planning Model on the resulting project. This would give me an outcome and some guiding principles (e.g. I'm not going to do any work but file tax forms in the tax folder as they arrive, which I do as a normal course of processing inboxes year round). I'd end up with a list of forms required for last year's taxes, and about when the last one arrived (e.g. mid March when the mutual funds settle and send the forms). I'd put a tickler for mid March to: "compare the received forms against the list, create WF entries for the remaining forms & activate the project."

Then I would put the project in my #℠started someday list. When mid March arrives, I would handle the tickler and reactivate the project.
Roger said:
This might make the most sense in terms of horizons, with an Area of Focus being Finances, and Taxes being a sub-area of that. We probably want to review an Area of Focus like that, what? Every month? Every couple months?
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I would tag the taxes projects with the #Finances area of focus tag so I see it when I review the finances area of focus.

I could leave it in the projects list but I'm working on building trust in my system to remove something from focus until I actually need my focus on it.

Thanks for the example and your thoughts. It helps to talk through handling of specific situations.
Clayton.
 
cfoley said:
I have quite a free flow between my projects list and Someday/Maybe, and a list of questions that help me decide during my weekly review.

- [x] Did I make progress on this project last week?
- [x] What will I have time to do next week?
- [x] Does it matter if this project never gets done?
- [x] Should any of these projects be merged?
- [x] Do my projects help me move towards my higher horizons?

When I move a project to Someday/Maybe, I am renegotiating with myself, letting go of any obligation to that project other than to reconsider next weekly review. The fact that I might have started working on it previously does not give it any special status in my system. There is no reason that an incomplete project would necessarily be more important to my future self than anything else.
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I just finished my projects review using this checklist. It was very helpful and brought clarity to what I want in my projects list.
Thank you for the checklist.
Clayton.
 
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