I think that this tends to depend on the person, the work, and the work style. But I do think that sometimes what looks like wasted effort is saving a lot of other wasted effort. That's definitely true for me with putting most things in project material and then wasting time moving actions over to my lists.
I find it so intriguing to read that people operate like this, because I just can’t.
- trusting myself to remember what to do would make me stressed and not get the project off my mind (I know this from experience)
I do realize that trusting yourself to remember stuff negates much of the point of GTD. I tend to do this for things where that freedom is a bonus rather than a source of stress--certain hobbies, for example.
- I do a lot of complex projects, it does matter if I forget to do something and I don’t wish to make future me work to remember what I did or didn’t do (if I have 3 literature searches on the go I need to know where they’re up to)
See, complex projects are situations where I would absolutely use project support material rather than making any effort whatsoever to put a large percentage of the project into my GTD lists. For one thing, as I explain with my garden example, the best way to track the project and choose tasks may not be any sort of list.
- I am utterly baffled that people put things in project support then move them over because that is reprocessing, no? I know it’s what DA says to do, it just makes no sense to me and I can’t do it (plus I like an indication of how much is left to do).
If I don't do that, then I do a whole lot more reprocessing.
I used to have long lists of tasks in OmniFocus, but it was rare that any of those lists survived past two or three items without having to be redone. The problem was bad enough that a next action of "Clean up this action list" was a very regular event for many of my projects. When I didn't have time to do that cleanup, I often found myself looking down at the mess that was the old list of actions, choosing one, and dragging it up to be the next action. In other words, I was using the long list of actions AS project support material.
Redoing the lists in OmniFocus was a lot more work than just editing or retyping a "project support material" list in a regular text editor. In a text editor, I can just scroll the old list down, type the new one while glancing at the old one, and delete the old one. And since the list exists purely as a reminder, the things that make the items OmniFocus-ready for me--careful ordering, context-independent phrasing, choosing a context, etc., etc.--were unnecessary. I could make the list as manicured or as rough as I wanted.
So long lists in OmniFocus used to cost me far more time than I spend just glancing at project support material and then adding an action to OmniFocus.
Also, every item in OmniFocus costs me. This is me--it may not be true of anyone else. I need my everyday lists to be very simple and streamlined. If they're not, they distract me. I have yet to find the perfect OmniFocus settings that keep them from distracting me.
Also also, often the actions aren't reliably listable, or productively listable. I'm in the middle of getting my vegetable garden (120 beds) ready for the year. I could have created an elaborate master plan for that, with hundreds of actions, marching across the garden and the seasons. But the sequence depends on weather, on my schedule, on the progress of the season, on whether we want to pay the Garden Man for certain tasks, and so on.
It's far more useful, for me, to have a plan of the garden, the status of the beds, and the plan for each bed. I stare at the plan and create the next two or three actions. If certain goals were critical and trying to remember them was distracting me, I'd also have a list of priorities and a list of "too late" dates.
I just reorganized my personal OmniFocus to be EVEN SIMPLER than before. Eight active projects, 22 Someday/Maybe projects, and the dozens and dozens of other projects are in various forms of project support material. For example, those 120 beds could in theory be 120 projects--or a lot more; one salad bed could involve growing seedlings of multiple kinds of plants. But those projects are represented by the garden plan and some notes until they're on the verge of becoming reality.
That way I don't spend ten hours in December planning an elaborate ten-bed spring salad garden that gets outprioritized and ends with me just broadcasting a cover crop over that soil until I get back to the salad garden next year.
Now, you'll see that my examples tend to be personal stuff. I'm still struggling with a work system that works for me, given the very limited set of available tools, the fact that I can't have work data anywhere but work machines, etc. If I didn't have those issues, I'd use the same system for work.
I don’t want to keep things in my head and don’t understand this aspect of GTD that would force me to. It’s different if you don’t know what needs to be done but often you do. Or I do.
Well, I don't think that you'd have to keep things in your head--you could keep them in project support material. It's the task-moving, which you see as reprocessing, that's harder to avoid.