havoc1;60573 said:
Hi,
* How many projects do you have on the go?
I could envisage 30 or 40, and that's going to get cumbersome to look at in Outlook Task view. Do you categorise or sort them further if you have that many?
You might have anything from 30 to 100 projects or more. But relax, you had them in your earlier system (perhaps your mind) anyway. Here you are just extracting them in an external system. Further, to begin with, try without sorting. For most of the times, you will need to look at one project at a time only, so the list does not need to fit in one page. As you gain experience, you might find it convenient to sort them in categories, not for the purpose of reducing the number that you see at a time, but for your own other reasons of reviewing.
* Sub-projects. Do you split your projects down into sub-projects, and if so, how do you manage them in Outlook?
I don't know much about Outlook, but you can either make the subprojects individual projects, or keep them in the project notes of the bigger project. What is important is to review those subprojects at least during weekly review so that they don't stay long without next actions. And as TesTeq has said, some of the larger projects may be actually Areas of Focus.
* Items in each context - how many do you have? Do you sort or sub-categorise these as well?
I used to be afraid of the number of next actions in my real physical context (and tried to further subdivide it according to some criteria), but now I am not. Each time you don't know what to do, go through the appropriate context list, and choose based on your intuition. I have about 50 on my office list, and I have heard of people having 150 or more next actions. Relax, and remember that (1) by putting 100 actions on a context list, you are not going to do them all at once; you can do only one action at a time, and (2) even before you got into GTD and made these context lists, you already had these many alternatives to choose from. All that GTD is doing is making you aware of your options. It is natural to feel overwhelmed when one suddenly faces so many of options. But trust yourself, one really gets better and better with looking at 100 actions, choosing the best action according to context-time-energy-priority, and not feeling bad about the other 99 actions, since you will be coming back to them one by one.
I see a lot of value in the system but am worried that I will turn a big paper pile into an even bigger pile of stuff in Outlook that will be unmanageable.
Anything left to itself will turn unmanageable, whether small or big. Ignore the size*; those many items were in your life anyway. Weekly review is the key. You need to look at all aspects of all the items in your inventory and revise them whenever you notice them being different from what you have in mind. After all, a GTD inventory is an extension of your mind ("distributed cognition"!), so the items in it should reflect the status of the items in your mind.
(*Ignore the size except: proactively check during the weekly review whether you are overcommitted, and do something about it if so. The size is then the amount of work you are committed to, not just the number of items on your inventory.)
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Abhay
