How many Actions to create per project? I can't decide...

[John Smith]

Hi

I need some advice on how to handle too many tasks (using MLO).

According to GTD theory, you are supposed to list absolutely every task, right? But this can make for painfully long lists, even if you put a fair number of them into your Someday/Maybe list or use a future Start Date (to create a Tickler list)

But if I create say a few Actions for each project (which is helpful for larger projects), then things quickly get much worse!

So I can't decide how many Actions to create per project.

A.) Reasons to create MORE Actions:

a) For projects where I catch myself starting to procrastinate, I like to break them down into several small tasks (i.e. Actions). The smallness of the individual tasks helps make the project seem less daunting and helps me keep momentum.

b) Likewise having several potential Next Actions listed helps me chose between them depending on their importance/urgency, (and - if I am being honest - depending a little on my mood !)

BUT

B) Reasons to create FEWER Actions:

The trouble with having long lists of Actions is that even the act of giving every single action a Context quickly becomes a pain.

Also I have been experimenting with giving each Action an Importance and an Urgency as well. This can keep help sight of important stuff in particular. However this makes entering data even more painful!

I have also tried using the manual dragging of items up and down the sort order of a list, as this creates a sort of relative priority and this helps in some ways, but is still clunky, as it's not clear how far to drag stuff.

I have also experimented by using stars - which MLO helpfully allows you to filter out separately of course. And I have also tried marking high priority items in colour. And/or making certain things bold. This works up to a point, although I find myself UN-starring and un-marking up certain uncompleted items...

However that fact is that when you have too many Actions it quickly become a pain to read them all whatever you do!

And worse, when statuses change (e.g. become more urgent) this can be disastrous because it's all too easy to lose track of important/urgent things when priorities shift around as they inevitably do.

- Any advice anyone?

 J

P.S. Is it possible in MLO to have tick-lists for very small tasks which do NOT appear on all your normal lists of Actions & Projects etc ?

[Eric Unger]

Hey J,

> According to GTD theory, you are supposed to list absolutely every task, right?

You are not supposed to list absolutely every task.

David Allen often indicates that some of his most inspiring actions and projects never made it to his lists.

More generally, you are dealing with two separate issues: action granularity and action prioritization.

Action granuarity (ie. small vs. big tasks): 

My take is that there is no action size that fits all. Various factors may have an impact on the action size (small vs. big) that best works for you: the complexity of the work you do, your own maturity with GTD, your anxiety level, etc. 

So, I cannot provide you with a particular recommendation because the best will be the one that you will devise for yourself: You have to practice GTD and determine through trial and error the size and number of actions that makes sense for your particular situation. 

I know that my own practice has evolved over time along with my maturity with GTD: my tasks were very detailed when I started (and it was NOT very efficient;  I was so stressed out that I had to put everything down, even the most mundane tasks, which helped relieve some tension.), but over time I ended following more closely D. Allen's own advice, ie. putting down only the things that were "on my mind". To put it plainly, you won't see for instance "shave this morning" on my list, but rather "R&D cities to visit in California during next fall trip".

Action prioritization:

It seems like you are spending a good deal of time and effort trying to "prioritize" actions as you enter them in your system (through stars, bold type, or priority setting). This goes counter to the GTD methodology, and you have experienced first-hand the inefficiency of such approach (decried by D. Allen himself): priorities keep changing anyway, so the priority you set in stone one day becomes irrelevant in a matter of days, if not hours, with the stack of new actions that has come your way in the interim.

If you stay true to the GTD approach, you'll save youself time, energy and frustration, by not setting any priorities, and just sticking to contexts. It is when your review your active actions in the context you are currently in that it is the best time to choose the most appropriate task to tackle next.

Don't look for a system that will tell you magically what to do and when because such system does not exist. GTD's fundamental message is that choosing what to do and when is essentially your call, and that the only "help" you can give yourself is by filtering out actions, by context, so as not to be bothered by actions that are irrelevant to your current setting.

All your active actions should be actions that you ought to be doing ASAP, so if you feel like there are actions that you should not view (even if they did apply to the current context), it means these are not active actions.

In this case, you have two options in MLO:

- either move hem to your someday/maybe list

- or select the "hide the branch" option (which in effect hides actions from "active" views).

Good luck with implementing GTD.

Cheers,

E

[Lisa Stroyan]

The "Hide in todo" will make a subtask inactive and hide the task from views that contain only Active tasks, and will be shown in gray in the outline. Even more useful, a task with children that are hidden, is itself active, which parent tasks are usually not (parents with outstanding children, that is). So if I have

PM Routine

     Take supplements

     Review tomorrow's schedule...

If the subtasks are hidden, "PM Routine" will be active. 

I don't know how many tasks you should create but here's my modified/inspired by GTD strategy. I don't break tasks down into component actions in MLO until they are on the horizon. (or if they are recurring). If I know steps that will be in the list I put them in the notes. So for example, in our mold remediation project, I had "Get the ducts cleaned" - clearly not actionable at that level of detail. But that couldn't be done until all moldy materials were removed and a bunch of other things. I might have a note with it, "need to solicit recommendations / look at schedule dependencies" but I wouldn't break it down into steps until it was coming up. The further the horizon, the less detail I have in my tree, theoretically. (It's all a bit theoretical at this point for me; my task tree is a mess, which those of you that know me can imagine is a rather painful state for me :).

     

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 7:01 PM, John Smith <shi...@gmail.com> wrote:

P.S. Is it possible in MLO to have tick-lists for very small tasks which do NOT appear on all your normal lists of Actions & Projects etc ?

--

Lisa

---

Lisa Stroyan, mailto: lstr...@gmail.com

[John Smith]

Yes - I'd slightly forgotten about Hide the branch in To-Do. 
Interesting... I guess things that aren't QUITE ready yet could usefully be hidden there rather than buried in my Someday-Maybe folder.

That way they are there when I am in (daily & weekly) review mode, but hidden when I am in action mode. 

Needs more experimentation. But OK I'll add Alt-Y to my list of hotkeys!

Thanks

J

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[Dwight Arthur]

On Sunday, January 11, 2015 at 8:01:13 AM UTC-5, John Smith wrote:

I guess things that aren't QUITE ready yet could usefully be hidden [behind "hide branch in to-do"] rather than buried in my Someday-Maybe folder.

The most compelling lesson I learned studying GTD was that every bit of my brain-power used reminding myself of some task I shouldn't forget is that much less brainpower available for working on executing my tasks.

So the answer to how much detail to enter into my task list is, enough to free my mind from all the nagging reminders it's carrying. I'm hoping to clear some underbrush in the spring to make a new parking spot. It's been on my mind, so I put it in my profile. I set it as a quarterly goal (I use the MLO "yearly" goal to mean quarterly) which means I't be looking at it at my next quarterly review, presumably in late March. If/when I do this, there will be many steps these steps have not yet started haunting my thoughts so I have't saved them to MLO, except for (as Lisa mentioned) a few notes like hiring a paver and checking if I need any permits. If I find myself spending time thinking through the steps, I'll open the reminder, create some preliminary work breakdown just to clear my mind, and file it back again.

Which brings me to someday/never. To me, the important thing about someday/never is that these are things I totally can ignore for the time being. I never ever have to think to myself, is there something in that folder I have to take care of. I review the someday/never folder quarterly, and I decide whether I should be moving any tasks out into some other category like yardwork or financials. If I put something that was "not QUITE ready yet" into someday/never, I would have to start worrying about "is it ready yet" and checking it from time to time, which to me would rob the someday/never folder of its role and its value.

Here's an example of what I do with not-quite-ready stuff. I sent a payment to an important vendor and I find myself thinking about whether it will arrive on time, get deposited, clear, etc. So I create a task in my inbox "did payment to xxx clear?" - I set a start date of 2 weeks because there's no point in checking this any earlier. This is super each to do: type <alt><s>2w<alt><1> - then I drag it to my Financials folder. This causes it to inherit the context <Financials from the folder. I tend to obsess about financials and spend too much time on them, so I manage this by confining my financials work to two times per week, Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. The <Financials context is open at those times and closed the rest of the week. So the task (and the folder) do not show up in my to-do list other than the two times per week that I do financials; it's Sunday morning now but the task is not there because the two weeks are nut up yet.  The two weeks will be up a week from tomorrow; the task will appear the following Wednesday evening. If I don't get to it then, I will get it the following Sunday morning, two weeks from today.

Sometimes there's more to do than fits into the time slot. My to-do list includes a sort (3rd level) of how long since the last time this entry was changed, oldest first. That way, If I can't get to everything I will get to the stuff that's been waiting longest. If I know I'm not getting to everything today and the item at the top of the list seems like it could wait, I just make some quick mod (like adding a blank into the note field) and it instantly drops to the bottom.

The point is that there are a lot of ways of clearing stuff out of your to-do list so that the stuf you should do now shines through. It's best if the reason each item gets hidden has some relation to the reason you needn't do it now, because that minimizes the amount of time you need to spend thinking about the stuff that's currently hidden.