We can describe the steps needed to achieve an outcome in many ways.
If I were a seasoned assassin, "kill my boss" might be a NA. But if I were a neophyte, I might need something different. Under that project plan titled "Eliminate short-term annoyances," I could list the following actions: remove gun from desk drawer, check that safety is off, place gun in attache, call boss to check that he is in the office, walk to office, remove gun from attache case, insert right forefinger in space in front of trigger, flex right forefinger, put gun in attache case, walk calmly out of office.
Once I were prosecuted I could argue that I was not guilty of murder. I could use my trusted system to support my claim that all I did was flex my right forefinger; surely an innocent act.
Doing your laundry can fall under many descriptions. We are often misled by David's claim that any outcome that requires more than one action is to be listed as a project. This claim sounds universal and absolute. But our trusted system is not a computer script telling us how to operate. Rather than there being a universal or absolute way to accomplish things, there are instead many different particular ways that are relative to each person and relative to that person's particular circumstances.
As David points out again and again, we need to enter as much as we need in our system and no more.
In his GTD book, David present Going Out to Dinner as his exemplary project with which he demonstrates his Natural Planning Model. You define the outcome, you vision, you brainstorm, you set up a plan, you modify the plan. Was the point of his example to tell us that next time we plan a dinner out this is what we should do? Of course that is a rhetorical question.
We use our judgment to determine what David calls the "granularity" with which we plan. And we cannot predetermine the level of granularity we need with any simple algorithm. I am changing daily and my needs change daily. My trusted system reflects who I am. How I enter information into my trusted system and how I use my trusted system changes as I do.
I think that the question you raise, DeveloperMCT, is a significant one. Sometimes the most simple and seemingly trivial issues reveal fundamental principles. At times David has said that he only thinks once a week, that the rest of the week he is merely carrying out instructions that he gave himself when he was doing his planning.
That too, is a rhetorical point. For David also writes that often he chooses to do something in his garden that was never on the plan he and his wife formulated. The plan is not a script that runs us. The plan is a tool that we use consciously. It is not the case that we create the plan and then the plan determines us. In terms of what is going on from a phenomenological viewpoint, we create the plan and then we make judgments from moment to moment on how we are going to use the plan.
It's very difficult to program a robot to walk down a rocky path. But when I have to do my laundry, I never even make a conscious decision about how I am going to transport my able body from my bedroom to the laundry room.
