gtd in academia? + recommended software?

[Folke]

Do people use a top-level sort of Area of Responsibility, and do they find it useful?

I don't think the vast majority do that, but I do, and I got the impression from mcogilvie above that it is common among Omnifocus and Things users, too. (I use Doit.)

I myself use it primarily for review purposes, not so much for daily task selection. The "cost" in terms of keystrokes for new tasks is virtually nil - my projects are permanently linked upwards and most of my new tasks go into such projects (or into single action lists, as I believe this type of container can also be called in Omnifocus). The value of it to me is significant. It allows me to review my stuff in a structured order, looking at one group of AoRs at a time (such as Personal or Business or Non-Profit; ~ 30k) (or a new 30 k objective; I keep those at the same level), and then going into the individual AoRs and/or projects within that.

But I have heard many others (like yourself) say that they see no point in this. It is really an interesting question why some of us seem to like it so much, and others not at all. I think for me the value comes from the fact that I get dizzy and irritated by seeing all kinds of stuff mixed up on a single page when i want to plan ahead. In those cases I want to focus on one "thing" at a time (like an AoR or a project etc), and this refocusing takes a bit of effort.

I also find that the interpretation of AoR that I use - not as a "type of task" such as reading or traveling or bookkeeping etc, but as a defined "job role"; a "responsibility towards a well-defined category of people" - helps me "empathize" with the role and what the responsibility entails, which makes me more creative and foresightful in my reviewing.

I seldom have a problem with projects belonging to more than one AoR. It does happen, of course, but I can be resolved. It is not nearly as common as the equivalent problem with contexts - the fact that a task can require more than one tool or person or place etc, but you chuck it into the most significant one and forget the rest (or a have an unwieldy mass of combo contexts). Same with AoRs - there is usually just one "role" in the driver's seat, and the rest, if any, are "passengers". I currently have 5 contexts, and I have 10 AoRs across 3 groups of AoRs, and I have 2 goals/objectives at 30 k.

 

[mcogilvie]

I'm getting the impression from this thread--though I may be hearing people wrong--that people store their tasks and projects in a hierarchy that leads up to an Area of Responsibility. That is, for example, if you're using OmniFocus and you follow a project all the way to the top, you'd travel through a folder for an Area of Responsibility.

I don't do that, and I struggle to see the value in it. The lack of value to me may be due to the nature of my job, where a substantial majority of my tasks support more than one purpose. If I went down a hierarchy starting with Areas of Responsibility when looking at my projects, I would constantly be trying to remember which AoR I declared to be most important for the project in question.

The same would be true of my personal life. A sewing project, for example, is about skill-building and art and frugality, and potentially any area of my life that's affected by clothes (feminity, social anxiety, work), and it might be intended to replace other clothes and therefore be about decluttering, and I'm fairly likely to track and blog it, so it will also support writing and my blog and and and and...

Do people use a top-level sort of Area of Responsibility, and do they find it useful?

Because of the way Things and OF are built, organizing by Areas of Focus is probably the most common organization, but it's not mandatory and there are other ways to arrange things. My areas of focus/responsibility are not particularly centered on values or self-development. I have Research, Travel, Teaching, Work (admin stuff), Fun, Personal, Stuff, Health, Finance, and Mom & Dad (this is a big responsibility right now). I have found that if I can see a list of all items (projects, next actions, waiting for, ..) in a given area, I don't really need a project-next action connection. Sometimes a next action serves more than one project or none. Of course the areas of focus are not completely disjunct either, but I am comfortable with any ambiguity.

 

[serge]

I also became interested in GTD after becoming an assistant professor at a research university and trying to cope with the broad range of things being thrown at me. Before that I had been a postdoc and life was pretty linear, but suddenly I found myself having to juggle 30+ balls and that took some getting used to. That was 10 years and I've been tenured for most of that time, so at least I can say that GTD didn't do too much damage!

After experimenting with a range of systems of varying complexity I've settled down on a relatively simple GTD implementation which I find suits well my range of responsibilities. I use Toodledo (web/iphone/ipad) in a vanilla sort of way, that is:
- I only use plain lists of tasks/projects/areas. In particular, I do not use the hierarchical features like sub-tasks. This is because, in practice I don't need a reminder of what project or AoR a task belongs to in 99% of the cases (e.g., task "call B. regarding new fume hood" falls under the project "upgrade chem lab", where else?).
- I use contexts for tasks but since I am wired most of the time I keep it simple (@home, @errands, @braindead, everything else means generic work and has no context since I can do it from home or at the lab).
- Like mcogilvie, I use an electronic tickler in the form of a simple list with due dates. I played with a paper tickler for a while but in practice there wasn't enough in there to warrant all the folder shuffling (I typically have only about 20 items in the list).
- I treat each research topic as a separate project ("Supervise research on 4-inch nails") so that during my reviews I can prickled to think about whether there's some action I could be taking to move that research forward. I also add a separate project for each article I am writing. Even though this is in principle a subset of a "research topic" project, it requires its own set of actions. As argued above, I don't see the need to have the software remind me of this hierarchy between projects - it's always obvious as I am never working on more than 6 topics and 10 papers at any given time.
- I agree that committees are not projects: they go on the calendar and spawn concrete actions, but that's it. The only exception is if I am coordinating the committee, in which case I create a project as a reminder during the review to think about whether I should be taking the lead in some action related to the committee.
- When teaching I usually don't bother to itemize every action/project as it tends to be quite linear and usually has to be done right and there (lecture tomorrow morning, guess what I'm doing tonight?). The exception is for longer-term planning (project: "choose textbook for next year").
- Under AoRs I have the obvious (people supervision/funding/teaching/develop group infrastructure/...) but also the all-important item "renewal of research". I find it important to stimulate myself to spending some time thinking about the longer-term picture, otherwise I tend to lose the forest for the trees.

Fun thread. I hope this helps a bit!
Serge

 

[dhawk312]

Do people use a top-level sort of Area of Responsibility, and do they find it useful?

In the very short time I've been using GTD (after starting this thread), I've found Areas of Responsibility very useful because it's how I think about my life/work. The areas themselves don't change but the work in each area does. Having the AOR is nice way for me to see how much I've taken on or what I have on my plate currently based on the area. One of my AORs is Teaching. I know what I teach, but this changes semester to semester, as does whether I teach undergrads, masters, or PhD courses. I've decided to list each course as a project with reminder updates each week for what prep I need to do (i.e., what is the topic of my next lecture, discussion, etc.)...my teaching load is minimal but with everything else I can't remember what my topic next week is without pulling out my syllabus so this just saves me that extra step. I work in the UK, where my university uses a modular teaching system (I'm from the US and the modular setup is ridiculous to me), which adds another layer of complexity (module coordinator vs single session instructor vs multi-session instructor) that the AOR helps me capture and keep track of pretty nicely so far. As a module coordinator I just don't teach, I also have to send documents to review boards, keep track of first and second markers for assignments, set up instructors for specific sessions, etc.--I know these aren't just teaching tasks per se, but they are part of my university-defined workload of teaching. Without using the AOR this would be a bit more hectic for me to keep track of at a glance. It just seems a like nice way to capture what I have going on and what needs my attention in a predefined area of my life. Sorry, kind of lengthy but I hope that helps answer your question. It works for me so far though. If I stopped using GTD right now, this is probably something I'd still try to keep in my productivity scheme.

@mcogilvie - your idea for not including committees as projects is really fabulous and I've extended this to similar sort of positions. I'm an Assoc Editor for a journal and I've set it up the same way, and it's worked beautifully. Much like committees, being an AE isn't a project in itself, but it's a source of them. I've set it up as an AOR, then just set up next actions (write decision letter, find reviewers, waiting for reviews, and so on) of each manuscript on my desk. Super simple set up that I probably wouldn't have thought of on my own.

So far the only time I've had an issue using AORs is for separating grants and research, which I want separated from one another. I've set up each research project as an active project. Some of these have grant proposals associated with them and the research will conducted whether the grant is successful or not (don't tell the funding agency though!). These have tasks or next steps independent of the grant proposal, which is why I've categorized them into Research. Then I have grant proposals where the research won't be conducted without the funding, usually based on a solicited research topic by the agency. I’ve set these up as projects on their own since there is not yet research associated with them. The only reason this is an issue is because if I only want to see my AOR – Grants, then only the latter show up. To see the former then I have to look under my AOR – Research. I’ve sidestepped this by adding the tag #Grant to the specific project actions related grant writing. If anyone has a way to simplify this setup, I’m all ears.

Right now this looks like:

Research
---AUTHORS
--------GRANT AGENCY proposal
------------Prepare budget
------------Get letter of institutional support
--------Prepare experimental manipulations
--------Write literature review

Grants
---GRANT AGENCY proposal
--------Prepare budget
--------Get letter of institutional support

 

[Folke]

Would it be possible in your case to initially treat each project as up to three separate GTD projects? Like this:

Project 1, immediately active: Do the research that is independent of external funding (In some cases, this is the whole project)
Project 2, immediately active: Obtain funding for the extension part of the research (this applies only to some projects)
Project 3, initially inactive: Do the extension part of the research (only if funding is obtained; possibly merge the two parts at this stage)

A naming convention might help you see the relationship between your projects clearly enough, and/or if your app allows you to tag and group entire projects in a visible enough way. It will depend a lot on what features you have available in your app, and on how many research projects you have all in all.