It did indeed help. Thanks for your feedback Jason. I've included additional comments in line.
On Jan 7, 7:46 am, jdunham <[email protected]> wrote: > Re #1: It's known that it's not very easy to use subprojects. But if > you projects are extremely hierarchical, maybe you should be using a > real project management tool, which mGTD is not intended to be. > If you look at a project, you should see all its owned taskes -According to GTD, if any task contains a subtask, it becomes a project. If you're capturing all of your thoughts, then projects can quickly become very hierarchical. I have 10 overriding goals for 2009 in my personal realm. I've listed them as projects and nearly every project I create for my personal life is falling under one of those projects. This is in addition to my normal chores. Each of those projects has numerous steps, many with sub steps, etc, etc, etc. I think I should still be able to use mGTD for this. What "real" project management tools offer the flexibility of mGTD without a lot of overhead? All I really need here is the ability to display project views by hierarchy, preferably sorted by priority. > > Re #2: I also have trouble with having lots of tasks and trying to > figure out which is the next action. However there are stars which > can form a very simple (binary) priority system. Again I think if you > are spending a lot of effort prioritizing your tasks, you are > detracting from the simplicity of GTD itself. One thing that helps me > is to make sure most of my tasks are owned by projects, and to only > let a few projects be active at one time. This keeps my next actions > list manageable. Then when I finish some projects, I can go find > another project to make active, and get a few more tasks. You are > supposed to 'forget' about the other projects, confident that they > have been captured in your GTD system, and it's this forgetting that > actually allows you to focus on the few active tasks and get your work > done. You could also start your tasks with numbers and your projects > with letters (ABC) or something like that, and they would always sort > in priority order. I was using MLO for a while. The two things I really liked about it were the hierarchical views and the relative priorities, where a priority was relative to it's parents and siblings. This made reporting a breeze. The reason I switched to mGTD was the ease & flexibility of capturing data, especially notes (I'm a fan of tiddly wiki's). Using stars is an easy enough solution for tasks, and it will force me to reassess the values of the tasks when I run out of stars, which is probably a good practice. Priorities for projects are much more important though. While GTD is my favorite process, it is missing a few features, as noted by many bloggers. Not all projects are equal, and if we're really going to capture EVERYTHING in our heads or else let it take up space, we need a way to sift through a lot of projects. Not all of them need to be active, but it is reasonable to expect someone to be working on dozens of projects at once, since every task with a subtask is a project, and we can be working on these projects over the course of a year. I may not consider working on my porch a priority, but I can keep it active so those tasks are an option if I find myself at a point where I can't perform tasks for other projects. If every project should have a next action, and you have dozens of projects, then you'll have dozens of next actions. Sorting tasks by the priority of their projects helps to determine which next actions are most important. I shouldn't need to switch away from GTD just because I have a lot of work I'd like to get done if I have time. With {ts} plugin, I'll be able to monitor tasks that have been hanging around for a long time and determine if I should keep them or not. > > Re #3: someone already pointed you to that other thread. I am trying > it too, but the main solution is to keep very few next actions for > your active projects, and don't worry about the future actions until > your next actions have been exhausted. If your lucky enough to get to > that point before your weekly review, you can review just that active > project for a couple more next actions. My understanding is that every project should have a next action, and every action with sub actions becomes a project. This balloons into many projects pretty quickly. AFAIK, the plugin mentioned is just for making actions dependent on each other. I've posted a question in the thread to clarify. If the dependencies hold when either action becomes a project, then this will work for me. > > Re #4: When you look at a project, it's very easy to make a tickler > for that project (there's a + sign by the Upcoming Ticklers list. > Just click on that to make a tickler which says "make this project > active" and set the date, and then forget about the project. For > example, I have a project for my annual taxes, and six weeks before > they are due, my tickler is set to tell me to make the project active. Fantastic. I'm not sure how I've missed that for Projects. > > Hope that helps, > Jason > > On Jan 5, 7:03 pm, Drew <[email protected]> wrote: > > > mGTD is a great tool. It's great for capturing data in a flexible > > format. For the last six months, it's made a significant difference > > in my ability to execute on the GTD system. There are a few features > > that I really long for as I collect more active projects and tasks. > > > 1) hierarchical view of projects and tasks. The current views don't > > display the relationships between the projects. > > > 2) priority for project and tasks. This would help with sorting for > > reports and also for determining which tasks become next action > > tasks. It makes a big difference when you have a hundred tasks to > > only review the next 25 of priority 2 tasks instead of all 100. > > > 3) dependent projects and tasks. Some projects and tasks can't be > > started until others are completed, and they shouldn't be listed as > > next (or possibly even active) until their dependencies are completed. > > > 4) add tickler button for projects and tasks. When I make a project a > > tickler to be reminded of it later, I lose the view it provides of > > tasks and sub projects. I'd usually rather add a ticker than convert > > it to a tickler. This would include adding a tickler section to the > > project and task views. > > > Do you know if any of these are on the near horizon or if any of them > > would be easy for me to take on. My javascript skills are weak and > > rusty, but I'd be willing to brush up a bit for simple tasks. > > > Thanks, > > Drew --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GTD TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/GTD-TiddlyWiki?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
