Next action lists for projects - where to park?

I prefer doing actions instead of writing them down.

For most of my Projects I do not write down any actions except for the real Next Action(s) (on the @context lists). So I rarely put any actions in the Project reference materials. I prefer doing actions instead of writing them down.
 
chris345;78283 said:
how do I know this item is related to this project?
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I'm pretty sure I remember DA talking about this specific thing, in MiaW I think, and basically he says: In general, and especially if you keep on top of your Weekly Reviews, you'll know for each item what project it relates to.

My experience has borne this out; if you've run across difficulties with it, I'd be happy to hear about them.

Cheers,
Roger
 
I'm one of the few who associate next actions with projects. Mainly because keeping track of customer orders and some other projects that have similar tasks would be a nightmare. If I see a next action on my @Laptop context stating "Email final artwork proof", I have no idea which order it relates to unless I stop and look through all the current orders.

But if I have "(RochUniv) Email final artwork proof", I can email the correct file for the University of Rochester as soon as the laptop fires up. I always have parenthesis with the order or project abreviated. Always have and always will. It just makes sense for me.

As far as listing next actions in the actual project/order folder, yup, I do that too. For orders, I have a checklist that I must follow with each step through the whole process. When one step is completed, an "X" is indicated before that action and the next one is copy and pasted into the NA list at the appropriate context. For projects, it simply depends how much I planned out when brainstorming the project. If I brainstorm out the steps, they are all listed in the project folder.
 
graphicdetails;78317 said:
I'm one of the few who associate next actions with projects.
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I don't think that it's the few who associate next actions to projects. I think most of us do. I also do that all the time. My tool of choice is Omnifocus and it does that automatically. In my world I have to have the link as I may not get to a project for years and projects go inactive due to season and weather and then have to be picked up again easily. I require a tool that allows me to save all the thought and planning I did but still prune my lists for what I can really do now easily.
 
Oogiem;78343 said:
I don't think that it's the few who associate next actions to projects.
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The tools available for managing todo lists have gotten a lot better over the last five years. A big part of this has been the influence of gtd, but a lot is the web's ability to support lightweight, rapidly developing applications. This lets people try things likes tags and tag clouds very easily. Macs seem to have more gtd-ish software than pc's, but that may be because the todo functionality in ical is minimal.
 
It makes perfect sense to have a list of NA's for a given project, parked somewhere. In a paper system, I had them in a Project Notes section. Now that I am using Omnifocus, any NA can be both shown by Context or by Project. If there are tons of NA's, then the by Context mode can be set to show only one NA for each project.

rdgeorge
 
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