Creating an Archive of Completed Projects and Actions-Do you do this? How?

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AaronJ16

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My questions here is for Outlook implementation primarily. I am interested in how one might archive their completed projects for review. Does anyone do this? I do not remember DA ever mentioning that in his book, although I haven't reviewed it in a long time. This practice would be very useful for me, especially when performance reviews roll around. I would like to be able to go back and recite all of the projects I had brought to completion, and have a way of recalling the important obstacles that presented themselves along the way.

Any thoughts?
 
a good idea

Maybe just a spread sheet? Or you could use colored-coded index cards where colors matched a kind of project (e.g., green for financial, pin for personal, blue for household, etc) and file by date started or ended? Might be useful for justifying your position, developing a job description, etc. Think about what you would use it for first. Probably a key element would be comments about how it went for you. I saw a log book in a museum in which an early surgeon had kept an contemporaneous list of of all the surgeries he had done and their outcome for his entire professional life. I thought it was very interesting, albeit grim With an electronic calendar that is reliable, upon completion of any given project you could enter "FINISHED______" and comment, such as, "Went smoothly, appreciated help of____." I would assume that one could use FINISHED as a search term and get a list of these entries by date.
 
Jamie,

Thank you for your suggestions. I was thinking of something a little more simplistic and less structured and specifically applicable to outlook implementation. I may have come up with a good solution.

I just created a new category called "completed projects". Its now a simple matter of reassigning a completed project to the new category and clearing the old category. I suppose the missing piece is attaching the associated actions steps that were part of completing the project. I could copy and past into the project task. Not sure what the best way is for tying completed elements together.

Ideas?
 
Dragging completed items around is one way to do it. Another option might be to simply filter your task list to completed items sorted by categories.
 
Another thing you can do is create a new folder under "Tasks" and drag all of your completed Tasks from the primary folder into that folder. To assist with this you can set up a view of your Tasks folder where items are grouped by status.

Personally, I don't see the need to do something like this. I dump my completed tasks almost daily; it improves performance of Outlook and ActiveSync by keeping the data file small.
 
GTD itself is surprisingly coy about what happens after Doing. I'll occasionally put completed Next Actions into a Weekly Review folder if I don't want to throw them away for some reason.

The archiving of projects happens more-or-less automatically; about once a year I'll try to go through all my project folders and offload the completely-inactive ones into a cold-storage file cabinet.

Cheers,
Roger
 
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