So here we go: After using GTD heavily for now nearly 24 months, I just realised that I have misused the term project since the beginning. Not that I read the definition of it again, no, I just got frustrated with some of my projects hanging in there literally forever. So how come?
Essentially I found some of my project mirroring what in standard terms you would indeed call a project. A project in my GTD system equaled a delivery project to a client, another one an larger internal project dealing with a new service delivery model/methodology that I’ am involved in, a third one a large deal which I’ am managing.
So what’s wrong you’d ask. Everything. All of the three examples I’ve given, and I’ am sure you have similar projects yourself, take a very, very long time to close. Anywhere between 3 and 12 months. And whilst other, smaller projects disappear rather quickly from my GTD lists, these guys keep staying.
Not only do they deliver a lot frustation to me by doing so, they also tend to just pile up actions that loose order and more importantly relevance over time. Just as described in a post at tools for thought in an article about ‘Getting unstuck: How to jump start a listless action list‘ you will only find legacy issues in these projects. No only have they lost relevance, they also don’t come in any logical order any more.
Delete these hugh projects
Yep. Just go and delete them. Don’t bother on all those actions in there. They’d be lost and you could not care less. Most of them were legacy, meaningless and irrelevant to the projects success. Those immediate actions related to a particular aspect of that project will come back as soon as you setup a new project for exactly that aspect of the project.
Create tiny little projects
So what is tiny and what is little? Depends on the context. A project such as a client delivery project, an entire marketing campaign, a product development effort are fare too hugh. So tiny means aspects of these projects. Things you are currently doing, not those that might need to be done in 3 months from now.
Even single phases of a typical project life-cycle might be to big for a GTD project. Planning, Analysing, Designing, Implementing, Testing, Rolling-Out could be come impressively large animals each. Hence focus on smaller junks and eat the elephant in pieces:
- Create a GTD project for that one document you need to write, e.g. covering some specifications
- Look at the planning required for the next customer meeting and make a project for that
- Detail out the actions required to deliver the next Executive update
- Understand that you need to do a stakeholder analysis for your internal communication plan for the new product introduction and make a GTD project out of this
One large project = many small GTD projects
Many of these small projects can run in parallel. Some might be on hold for some time, some might get dropped as they loose relevance as the ‘large project’ progresses and e.g. changes scope slightly. But still, you will get your motivation from setting more and more of these small projects to completed.
But do not create all the small GTD projects you think are required throughout the course of the large project. Just those in your line of sight. No artificial ones, e.g. ‘We need to think of this!’
I’ve just delete five or six of my real-business-life/large projects from my GTD project list and created small ones focussing on the next important events or activities of these projects. Each of them does not contain more than 10-15 actions, all well sorted and ordered and I’ am looking forward to check each of those small projects off in like one, two or latest three weeks time. What a relief!
