I’ve been thinking about David Allen’s use of the word “project” for quite a while, and am becoming more and more unsatisfied with with it’s definition in my day to day work.
If you’re not familiar, here’s the official definition:
“Our definition of “project” is any outcome you’re committed to complete that requires more than one action step. That can encompass quite a range of things, from “Replace tires on the car” to “Reorganize marketing division.””
The problem, here is that in my lines of work, “project” already has a precise meaning:
A project in business and science is a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.
Now, if everyone I worked with agreed to change the definition of “project” to the GTD way, then everything would be fine. The reality, though is that I have to work with most people who don’t “do” (or usually have even heard of GTD), thus making communication difficult – or at least, somewhat confusing at best.
That doesn’t mean we don’t need “something” to define a committed outcome, we do. I’m just using the word “task” for that outcome statement.
This seems to work. I think have three major lists to work from:
- my projects. These are the things that involve other people, are managed by Microsoft Project or similiar, and use the accepted (varied) definitions. When I talk to my staff about the “project for client X”, we all know exactly what we mean.
- then I have my tasks lists. These are the committed outcomes, and usually – but not always, align to a higher level project. In many cases, a Project is Also a Task, but not all tasks are Projects.
- From there, I then have Actions .. the next action items to complete each task.
I’ve seen the Outlook GTD try to manage a similar issue … that of having “big projects” that require multipe “little projects” to complete managed by a “sub project” capability, which is sub-optimum in my view. By simply leaving the word “Project” as an externally defined entity, and managing at the runway level the Tasks and Actions.
The danger here … and one that I believe David may have been trying to avoid … is that systems other than GTD use the word “task” to mean something amorphous, and can itself be confusing when applied to GTD, and with GTD, the intent is to “break out of the mold” and not pigeoh-hole GTD with other time management systems. The reality for me is that I spend far more time communicating with people about who “don’t do” GTD about projects than I do about sub-projects, tasks, or actions … so aligning the updated definition is much easier when it’s an “internal” shift than it is trying to explain my meaning to each new person I work with, or having to mentally translate between definitions.
So I work, day to day, from my actions list which are tagged to tasks, just as described. Projects are reviewed at least weekly, usually as external commitments. And when talking with GTD’ers, I can mentally switch vocabulary and call my “tasks” projects, and we are all on the same page.
I’ve implemented this in pretty much every system that can implement tags. My Contexts all start with an “@”, my Projects all start with an “+” sign, tasks with a “-” sign, and the actions are tagged to the task/project/context for which they relate. This works in Remember The Milk, GMail and Evernote, among others – as long as you keep your tagging relatively consistent,
Getting a list is as easy as clicking on a tag, my actions list is eveything not starting with a special character, and moving from one list to another
Another side effect of this technique is that an action can “appear” on multiple lists, just by adding the appropriate tag.
It seems to be possible to create a “mashup” application that will pull data from all of the above plus others, I’m still experimenting with that concept. I find that it’s easy to keep all the Actions in RTM, but reference needs links to GMail and Evernote … and sometimes Google Docs or Dropbox. I’d also love to have a way to display appropriate task items from various PM tools such as RedMine.
Android is beginning to look like a promising platform for suh a mashup, while the iPhone’s lack of multi-tasking is seriously starting to cause frustration.
