What is a Project? A project is any outcome that will take more than one action step to complete. As a list, the Projects list will represent an index of the current outcomes on your plate. What is Someday Maybe? Someday/Maybe means you are not currently committed to complete it, but you are committed to …
Tag Archives: projects
Organizing your projects list
Dear David Allen: What do you recommend to organize the Projects list in order to quickly find a particular project? David: If you’re using a software application for managing lists, and if it can sort the list alphabetically, then get in the habit of writing the key word about the project first, so you can …
New graduate-level GTD seminar
Opportunity for GTD seminar graduates—we have just launched GTD Managing Projects and Priorities, a course designed for graduates of the GTD Mastering Workflow seminar, to dive deeper into the GTD models for planning projects and managing priorities. Debuting in 2 cities this fall: Seattle – November 2 Los Angeles – November 9 Register before September …
David Allen on linking projects and related pieces together
Countless questions have been e-mailed to me asking for the best ways and tools to organize project thinking, or how to relate project pieces to each other and to all the other projects and their pieces. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my answer is: “Do the Weekly Review. If you do, it all works. If …
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GTD & project management software
A GTD implementer asked: Can I use project management software for my GTD lists? Coach Wayne Pepper: From our perspective, project management tools are good for Project Support, not necessarily Next Action lists though. In other words, if I have a project that is so complex and intertwined that it needs to be broken down …
Missing deadlines
Question: You say you shouldn’t write anything on a day when it doesn’t absolutely have to be finished by then. Furthermore, you tell that priorities are depended on time, energy and a lot more, but I miss one thing there: deadlines. What if I make a list of things to do, and find on Monday …
The commitments you make – tips from David Allen
Question: Projects are my stumbling block. In fact, what do you do when everything you pick up seems to be yet another project (a multi-step thing to do)? The other options are easy to me compared to managing the multi-step things to be done. David Allen: Big key is simply to keep track of them …
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Organizing actions related to projects
Question: How did you organize your tasks? Am I suppose to have a main Projects category and corresponding action tasks categorized @home, @work, etc? David Allen: Yes, for me “Projects” is a category, just like the action lists of “Calls”, “At Computer” etc. They are simply flat lists, tied together with your review of the …
Controlling your work instead of being controlled by it
Dear David and Co., About three years ago, on a long plane ride, I was able to fully deploy GTD into a paper-based system. I had read the book. And the book suggested writing down all active Projects, Tasks, and Waiting Fors. After writing down all my projects, I looked at the list. It was …
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The GTD Best Practices Series
Do YOU know the best practices of GTD? Although they’ve been recorded for our GTD Connect online learning center, we have been posting the GTD Best Practices series to our free public podcast as well, for all to benefit from. These informal podcasts are a great way to learn the essentials of GTD. Here is …
Managing Projects – Tips from David Allen
Here’s a great Q&A between David and a new GTD’er. To appreciate David’s response, it helps to understand the GTD definitions for projects and next actions: Projects = Your outcomes that require more than one action step. Next Actions = Your next physical, visible action steps. Some are project-related, some are not. Question: If a …
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OneNote and ActiveWords — Ferrari Fast
A Community Contribution from Ryan Oakley Whether you’re a proficient OneNote user or just started using it after reading my GTD and OneNote article posted on GTD Times it doesn’t take long to populate the software with a tonne of pages and a tonne of information (yes, I am Canadian). First, some definitions: MS Office …
Getting your arms around your priorities
Let’s talk about the Horizons of Focus. In my experience, this is one of the parts of the GTD approach that can take a little time for people to get their arms around. This is where priorities and perspective live. Whereas traditional time management approaches attempted to give people an ABC type coding system for …
A project manager describes his GTD setup
Many of you enjoyed the GTD & OneNote article contributed by community member Ryan Oakley. Here’s another shout out for using Outlook & OneNote, from Ivar in Norway. I am writing to you to tell you how brilliant I think it is to use Microsoft Office OneNote in my GTD system. I’m from Norway and …
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GTD & OneNote
This is a community contribution by Ryan Oakley. For me, GTD has always worked extremely well for those small(er) tasks and projects. You know – those little things that used to fall through the cracks but, with the help of GTD, are now easily tracked and moved on until completed. These smaller projects don’t need …
What is or isn't a project?
A computer programmer implementing GTD asked David Allen about projects: I’m confused about (and I’m sure you are extremely bored with this question, but from the books I couldn’t work out the answer) – how do you size projects? I’m continually having problems working out what is or isn’t a project – and getting lost …
Tracking Projects
Dear DavidCo: After working with the GTD system for quite awhile, I find tracking next actions in Outlook to be pretty easy. The harder part is tracking projects. Where do you do that and how do you move from the 10,000 ft. level to the runway? Wayne Pepper, a senior coach and presenter with David …
A quick guide to GTD and projects
Some of the most common questions we get are about managing projects. Here is how one of the Coaches replied when someone new to GTD was asking how to manage projects and all of the related steps with GTD. There are 3 components to consider with your projects: 1. Tracking the outcome on a Projects …
Podcast on the GTD best practices of organizing
Having a total and seamless system of organization gives you tremendous power because it allows your mind to let go of the lower-level thinking and graduate to intuitive focusing, undistracted by matters that haven’t been dealt with appropriately. – David Allen In other words…get a seamless, leakproof system for tracking everything you can’t do in …
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Plugging holes when others aren’t getting things done
Jay, a college student, wrote in to GTD Times to ask about how to be productive in a largely volunteer-based organization. Can you still do GTD if other people around you don’t? Dear GTD Times, First off, let me say thanks for providing such a wonderful free GTD resource. It really means a lot to …
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