Next Action Question

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aubradford

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I just finished reading GTD and hope to fine-tune some of my systems. One question I came away with is very simply and perhaps I missed it in the book ...

Say I have a project with actions 1-5. I create a next action task for 1 and enter it into Outlook as a task. At what point do I create action tasks 2-5? Is there some way in the GTD method to denote the order tasks need to be done in or to note than one thing needs to get done in order to inform another thing?

Thanks for any input.
 
aubradford;74821 said:
Say I have a project with actions 1-5. I create a next action task for 1 and enter it into Outlook as a task. At what point do I create action tasks 2-5?
Click to expand...

Most of these sorts of questions are covered in the chapters about project planning and the Natural Planning Model.

Actions which cannot yet be acted on generally live in the Project Support for the project.

Cheers,
Roger
 
Project notes.

You can list the actions in your Project notes.

Often after doing the Next Action for the Project you know what to do next so you can move forward without looking to these notes and without the "create NA" administrative overhead. You should write down the next NA (a bookmark) when you stop working on this Project.
 
Not sure if Outlook can do this, but with SimpleGTD I have project "actions" where I write all the actions I can think of that are connected to that particular project then I just "star" the action(s) that I want to see appear in my next actions list ready to get done in the coming week.
 
Also, if there are more than one of your project steps that can be moved on (they don't depend on other steps being completed) then they can go on your active lists, too.

For example: to set up a party I may have to call five friends, order some food, and take my suit to the cleaners. Since there are no dependencies, I would put each of the calls on my @Calls, along with a call to the deli, and add "Put suit in car" on my @Home list, for a total of 7 actions - but "Pick up suit at cleaners" would only be in project support documents until it was something that could be done or scheduled on my calendar.

-Mark
 
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