Re: GTD, Projects, and Next Actions in org-mode

["Piotr Zielinski" <piotr.zielinski@gmail.com>]

On 03/08/06, Jason F. McBrayer <jmcbray@carcosa.net> wrote:

> I thought I'd ask to see how other people who are using org for
> Getting Things Done are handling projects and their relationship to
> Next Actions.

Thanks for bringing up this topic.  You're definitely not alone with
this problem, and I'd also like to know how others use org-mode for
GTD stuff.

I have a headline "* projects" with individual projects as
second-level headlines, sorted (manually and approximately) from the
most-important to the least important.  To mark  "next action" items I
just use the TODO keyword.   (Alternatively you can define a special
NEXTACTION keyword or tag.)  If I need to see the global list of my
nextaction items I use one of the following commands:
org-show-todo-tree (C-c C-v),
org-tags-sparse-tree (C-c \), org-agenda.  A bit of self-publicity
here: I find context-menus of org-mouse.el useful for invoking these
commands.

Allen recommends keeping all your info as a series of various lists,
but the advantage of org-mode is that some of those lists (such as the
list of current nextaction items) can be autogenerated every time it's
needed and not kept anywhere explicitly.

Apart from the "*projects" headline, I also have a "*todo" headline,
where I put all the todo items which are not clearly assignable to a
specific project (or when I simply don't have the time for finding the
appropriate project to put them under).  Once every while, I go
through the "*todo" hierachy and move some items into the appropriate
projects.  Sometimes groups of entries in the "*todo" hierarchy evolve
to the point of becoming a separate project by themselves.  This might
 look like a mess, but actually it allows me to spend more time doing
things than organizing them.

Actually, I was lying a bit: I don't have one "*projects" headlines,
but several of them: "*research activities", "*research projects",
"*other projects", all sorted from most-current to least-current.  I
recommend having separate project lists only if you have a clear-cut
distinction between them.  I also periodically move all projects
further than 10-15 places from the top of each list to one common list
"* one day / maybe".

Piotr