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How Do You Use Projects in GTD?

30 08 07 - 07:30 - Bookmark this post

The following is a guest post from Geoff R from Gearfire.net

In my opinion, projects are one of the least talked about and most diversely used components of GTD. In Getting Things Done, David Allen leaves a lot of room for interpretation on the topic of what kind of project you should have. That is why many people have different "levels" of projects. It struck me yesterday that I didn't quite know what I should be putting as projects. Should it be as concise as multi-step actions, which would change almost daily, or could they be as grand as your long-term goals? So far I have seen 5 ways of using projects in GTD.

1. Multi-step Actions. These are relatively short-lived, and will be completed and created often. May include such things as "Get new car stereo" which would then include smaller actions such as "compare prices online", "buy best stereo" then "bring to car shop for installation".

2. General Projects. Things such as "plan vacation" or any work or school related projects. These will have more steps in them, and will probably take at least 5 days to complete.

3. Short-term Goals. Things such as "achieve a credit score of xxx before dd/mm/yyyy". These will probably take upwards of a month until they are achieved, but are usually shorter than a year.

4. Long-term Goals. Generally longer than a year, such as "achieve # net worth by this year" or similar.

5. General Classification. Using projects as classification of actions, such as: social, financial, academic, etc.

Personally, I have gone down the list from classification to long-term goals, to short-term goals, and I am now I am using a mix of general projects, and short-term goals. Personally I think I like using short-term goals the most, but it really depends on what kind of person you are. Do you obsess with the short-term, doing everything you can, now? Or do you see into the future, and plan for later on? Either way, I noticed that the task app Toodledo has a Goals feature, which keeps track of your long-term and short-term goals. You can even tag your actions by goal, and see statistics about how many you complete for each goal!

So how do you use your projects in your GTD system?

Geoff R is a student productivity, organization, and GTD writer from Canada. He blogs at Gearfire.net, with a group of other high school and university GTD writers. You can subscribe to their RSS feed here.
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Ready-Set-Do! for the mac allows users to see their projects hierarchically so that low-level projects can be seen in relation to their larger short-term and long-term goals. It’s pretty sweet to be able to be working on a task and get motivated to do it because I can see that it is connected with those higher outcomes I want to attain. I have yet to see another GTD app like it.
Todd V - 30 08 07 - 21:50

I have implemented GTD in my organiser and have found the Next Action List,Waiting For and Agenda really useful. However I am finding it difficult to develop a project system works for me, but once I’ve found it I’m sure its going to benefit my life further, as the other features of GTD have.

Thanks for the tips and I look forward to reading other suggestions in the comments
Kate Davis - 01 09 07 - 14:57

Thanks for the insight. I see a lot of similarity with the 10-50,000 feet concepts in GTD. Multi-steps are the more 10,000 feet projects and long term goals have a more holistic view in them. I find myself working a lot on general and short term goals but I have a lot of long term and multi-step projects waiting. I discovered I haven’t worked on them for quite a while and tried to find out why. I found I need to reassess those actions since they are not clear enough. ThinkingRock also gives me projects and subprojects views so I can see the higher outcomes. It can be very motivating if I would just name those outcomes :-) Most of the time I don’t since the projectname itself has some sort of outcome in it.
Frank Meeuwsen - 14 09 07 - 12:30

I’ve discovered something similar. It seems I have a mix of short- and medium-term projects ranging from 2 weeks to 1/2 year. I also have some higher level outcomes that are more general, but I’m playing with tracking them as projects. The Mission Control people call these “concerns,” and mine include health, a long-term medical issue, etc.

However, I don’t track exercise, eating well, etc. because … I guess I don’t need to. They’re habits now.

Thanks for the post.
Matthew Cornell - 27 09 07 - 01:29

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Frank Meeuwsen