Comments on: Tracking Projects

By: Kevin Moore

Kevin Moore — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:51:14 +0000

I’ve put together an add-in to Outlook that incorporates project management functionality. You can manage all of your project based emails, files, contacts, tasks and appointments from one central location, right within Outlook.

You can find more information on our web-site: http://www.missinglinkprojectcenter.com

By: brad

brad — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:32:03 +0000

Instead of doing this, get the outlook add-in. In my mind, it paid for itself in 15 minutes. I used to use the other method as described here.

By: Chuck A

Chuck A — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:20:11 +0000

There are projects (small p) and then there are Projects (Large P).
A lot of what I read about manageing projects in GTD are the small p variety – i.e. Buy a new car.
Then there is the “Large P” variety – i.e. Integrate newly acquired company’s IT infrastructure.
As someone who manages “Large P” projects, that involve hundreds of tasks and lots of people (@Waiting For) I would love to hear from David more on that. The traditional “Project Management” tools (i.e. MS Project) are great for planning, scheduling and budgeting, but not so great at managing tasks in a Large project where there are many simultaneous “Next Actions” with individual assignments, and due dates.
I use GTD, but I always struggle with the Large “P” projects.

By: Göran Askeljung

Göran Askeljung — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:14:21 +0000

I concur with Clifford to some extent. Most people have Projects that needs tracking and planning, that are dependent on other peoples deliveries to succeed and causes @WaitingFor. Those I would track like Clifford does. Usually no one has more than 5-15 of those, because more would mean we don’t have time to get involved.

There are a lot of Projects though, that consists only of sequential task for myself, like 1-2-3-done. These I track only by focusing on the very next action and maybe, by adding a small simple Project Plan to the text field of the task.

For larger amounts of Projects, Cliffords method is not so good. The .P categories are then by volume overshadowing the @action tasks and you will need to start scrolling heftily.

It is then I recommend to switch Project tracking from the task pane to the Contact Pane.
Mis-use Contacts in Outlook by creating a Projects file (beneath contacts) and start adding @actions to those Projects using the ability in Outlook to add tasks to persons.

How to set it up you can read about here:
http://immeff.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1972368%3ATopic%3A273

For Outlook 2007 users you’ll need this to:
http://immeff.ning.com/forum/topics/1972368:Topic:104

Good hunting!

By: Clifford Ball

Clifford Ball — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:22:39 +0000

I do something a little different for projects. I use David’s prefix idea and have created a .P prefix. So if I have a project task it will get categorized to a context as well as a project. So my list of Projects is an active list, part of my Category list and each .P category has all of its associated subtasks. Everytime I add a task and categorize it, that list of .P projects is right there. It helps me keep my projects up to date and maintains my list of projects automatically instead of maintaining a non-connected list.