Comments on: Simplifying Getting Things Done: Projects

By: Rebekah O'Neal

Rebekah O'Neal — Tue, 27 May 2014 06:31:54 +0000

Perhaps another way to differentiate between an actual project or just a task is according to how it fits on a to-do list. For example, checking you post office box each week is a simple chore to add to your to-do list with no elaboration necessary. However, mailing Christmas packages is definitely a complex task that has multiple and varied tasks necessary to accomplish it which sure is not something simple to check off the to-list. I think the more thinking, planning, and decisions are involved with an activity, the closer it is to a project instead of just being something on your to-do list.

By: LJ Earnest

LJ Earnest — Fri, 16 May 2014 17:13:53 +0000

In reply to Fil Salustri.

I agree with you – once you have done the thinking, things don’t need to be spelled out.

I think your system of task hierarchies does remove the necessity of deciding on projects vs tasks. However, have you ever had a project linger because it never got to “done”? How do you know when you can wrap up something that has multiple sub-tasks? How do you handle last-minute additions (dusting the fixture while changing a light bulb)? Do those extras ever get in your way?

I’m asking because I truly want to know how other people handle what I know in my industry as “scope creep” where the project definition keeps expanding and never gets to “done”. Or perhaps there is truly no discreet unit of work, and that all the classifications we put on something to make it a project are arbitrary?

By: Fil Salustri

Fil Salustri — Thu, 15 May 2014 23:20:55 +0000

If you’ve never changed a light bulb before, you might want to think of it as a project at first (i.e. having multiple tasks). Eventually it wouldn’t be a project – so then you just delete the project and use a single task – “change the light bulb.”

Also, in the general case, one may find that a whole project is actually a task in a larger project.

So I prefer to simply be able to nest tasks within other tasks. Many apps allow one to rather arbitrarily shuffle tasks up and down a hierarchy of nested tasks. Doing this removes the meta-work of deciding whether an item is a task or a project, and focus more (at least, imho) on the relationships between tasks.

By: LJ Earnest

LJ Earnest — Wed, 14 May 2014 17:32:42 +0000

In reply to Bubba.

Yes, but David Allen defines a next action as the “next physical action” to be taken. This means that according to his definition, it would have all the steps.

The point was that the definition that David Allen uses is too narrow and is cumbersome.

By: Bubba

Bubba — Wed, 14 May 2014 16:10:40 +0000

I’d say it hinges on your understanding of what constitutes an “action step”. Since the main purpose of GTD is maintaining mental clarity about our tasks (“mind like water”), it makes sense to conceptualize a single action step as a task we can perform without first having to think through how to perform it. If you know you have spare light bulbs on hand and where they’re stored, then you don’t really have to think about how to perform “Change light bulb” and you can consider it a single action step. If you can’t proceed before buying a spare bulb at the store, then that’s almost certainly going to be something you have to think about as a separate action step. (And then while you’re in the @Errands context, it’s very helpful also to have “Buy milk and eggs” on that context-based task list we call a grocery list.)