Re: Need help with implementation
CAUTION: RESPONSE BELOW UNEDITED FOR SUCCINCTNESS
Let me first start out by saying that the whole GTD methodology is a personal thing. There's no point in following DA's suggestions if they don't sync with you. We're not all presidents of consulting organizations...
So, my comments below are for how I am following GTD in my daily life. It might not be 100% by-the-book, but it works for me. And it's pretty darned close to catholic, regardless.
Newbe said:
For each project should I have either an entry on my action list or on my Waiting For list
Next Actions
- [Clean Garaga] Buy shop vac from hardware store
- [Clear out Mother's house before sale] Call to rent U-Haul
Waiting For
- [Finish beta write-up] Wating for comments from joe
Two notes here: first, the standard implementation does not tie next actions to projects directly. That metadata is implied but not stated in the list. More on this later.
Secondly, next actions isn't a single list, it's a series of lists. There are five broad categories of lists: Projects, Agendas, Next Actions, Someday/Maybe and Waiting For. The longest and most detailed set of lists are obviously Next Action lists, which are contextual. Meaning that the list is of next actions that are related to your location/ context. I have Next Action lists for 'Home', 'Church', 'Office', and 'Errands' among others. When I'm at home, I can safely ignore the list for my office, and vice versa. I'm never free from the 'Anywhere' list, curse its immortal soul.
Here are some questions:
1) When I have 70 projects and they can have each have a task, waiting for, or a calander item how do I keep it in synch?
The Weekly Review, of course! On a day-to-day basis, there's little need for Project-level thinking. It's all about Next Actions. In the Weekly Review you can go over each project and make sure that you have captured the appropriate NAs, and that they're all still appropriate as Projects (and not Someday/Maybe fodder).
2) for project "Clear out Mother's house before sale" I have three steps that have to occur by a given day (get UHaul, get storage, arrange for friend to help unload). Can I have three next actions?
3) for many projects I have thought about the next ten actions, where to I capture this. If I put it in the project list it gets cluttered, on paper is a pain since eventually it is needed on list.
Some have argued that each project can have only one Next Action associated with it at one time, which seems silly to me. I frequently have three (or more) Next Actions associated with a project, and on the appropriate list(s). In my book, so long as they're all really next actions (each having no unfulfilled prerequisite), then they actually
belong on the NA list. If the path is cleared so they can be performed immediately, then they go on the list.
For some larger projects, I have also mapped out the steps beyond the immediate next actions. They're things which can't be done yet because I don't yet have the tools, or information, or whatnot. These get squirreled away in a "project support" location.
I have some of my project support in a free-form database on my computer. I have a few as MS Word docs on my hard drive. And a few more as ShadowPlan files on my Palm. In those files I have things like a couple of paragraphs describing a wildly successful outcome of the project, what steps I'll need to get there, and what obstacles I foresee. In an ideal world, I'd probably have all these planning documents in one location, but I am currently comfortable with this level of distribution. Most of the time, however, the value of the document is in the making: I have little need to find and study them again.
So I suppose that my answer is that you'll have a difficult time keeping everything in just one Word file. It's probably do-able in one monster outline, where you collapse your planning information, but it sounds like it'll be unwieldy very quickly.
As far as keeping projects and Next Actions synced, I really don't think it's necessary for a vast majority of the time. It's actually something I struggle with, and I'm recently coming to the conclusion that having the information linked is a crutch. It's something I do in place of actual work -- playing with "my system" in some vain attempt to reach the nirvana of organization: things are so clear that the work actually does itself. Or maybe it just doesn't seem so unpleasant to me.
But the unpleasant work remains unpleasant, regardless of how organized I've made my organization. And then I'm emotionally shackled to a system that has a heavier maintenance burden associated, with no additional return.
Let me put it this way: when the task on your errands list is "buy shop vac from hardware store" you'll know, without any fancy linking system, that you need it to clean your garage. You made the connection when you wrote it down on your list (either in your Weekly Review, or even midweek, when the NA presented itself to you mentally), and the connection will remain patiently in your psychicRAM (though consuming no cycles), until you are considering the actual completion of the task.
Let's pretend for a minute that you have something on your list which seems to be divorced from any project. Pretend that your "calls" list says "Call William to get updated sales numbers", and there you are, in call-mode, ready to dial William's number, and you can't remember why you actually needed those sales numbers. There's two solutions: you can quickly go over your Projects list (even at 70 items, it would be a 30-second exercise) or you can assume that if you can't recall what project to which it related, then it wasn't all that important. And you cross it off and move onto another NA. That's pie, either way.
At your Weekly Review (which I personally try to perform valiantly on Friday, and then again if necessary on Wednesday) you'll go over your list of Next Actions and your list of Projects and make sure that you're completely covered each way. That you have the appropriate projects for your lately-added Next Actions, and that every project has at least one NA associated with it.
It's surely
faster at that stage to have projects and NAs linked together, but I'm not convinced that speed is a virtue in that setting. Of course we want to avoid 6-hour Weekly Reviews, but the brief time it takes to copy down the list of projects and all next actions and sync them up on disposable paper is shorter than you think. The copying itself is perhaps a 10 minute exercise, and offers rewards that well outstrip the investment in time. The intimacy you'll gain with your lists by writing them out by hand is well worth every second with a pencil, making that redundant list.
Or at least that's been my experience. As always, this is how
I have chosen to do it. Others methods might be different and, for them, more effective.