Supporting Items...

[furashgf]

I think someone posted recently that David, at one of the new seminars, mentioned that during the weekly review you'd go through the approrpriate support material for each project. If you were a PM, for example, you might go through the project plan for that project, a teacher, the weekly lesson plan. This would be your source of ideas for Next Actions.

This tells me, however, that you don't need to keep every next action for the project, particularly delegated ones, in your list. For example, If I'm managing project X and there are 10 next actions delegated to other team members in the plan, I don't need to have all 10 in my "Delegated" list AND in the project plan also.

Am I getting this right?

 

[mcogilvie]

I think someone posted recently that David, at one of the new seminars, mentioned that during the weekly review you'd go through the approrpriate support material for each project. If you were a PM, for example, you might go through the project plan for that project, a teacher, the weekly lesson plan. This would be your source of ideas for Next Actions.

Yes, that's how I understand what DA says, and that is how I do it.

This tells me, however, that you don't need to keep every next action for the project, particularly delegated ones, in your list. For example, If I'm managing project X and there are 10 next actions delegated to other team members in the plan, I don't need to have all 10 in my "Delegated" list AND in the project plan also.

Am I getting this right?

If I understand you correctly, I don't think so. First of all, next actions are ideally fine-grained steps. It would be rare (for me, at least) to specify something at that level of granularity. Suppose I tell our sys admin to get hold of a software update and install it. This is, in fact, a project for him. I would put it on my waiting for list and perhaps on my calendar as a reminder to make sure it is completed by a certain date. The only real exceptions would be large projects in which progress is managed by rigorous use of formal planning software, where the data would overwhelm an individual system. You have to be careful with projects run by committees, because you may be tempted to try and track the project when that's not your job: it should be the job of the chair or of someone chosen to do it. As far as individual next actions that are not do-able yet, you are correct: there is no need to put them on a list. In fact, you shouldn't because they are a distraction, and subsequent events may remove the need to do them. I try to keep my loose planning on smaller projects at least one level above next actions. For small projects, this information is kept in the note section of the project entry on my palm and on my computer.