On GTD Times today there is a discussion about Kelly Forrister’s Mastering Workflow seminar, and an illustration of thinking about projects from a…z.
The post describes the project as ‘Z’, and your next step as ‘A’, and discusses how you document any other steps which may need to be done *after* your next action to get to ‘Z’ (i.e., project completion). There are some ideas about where you store these extra ‘next next’ steps.
Because emacs org-mode allows you to turn a heading or bullet point into a next action through a simple key combination (^C^T) I find that something along the following lines works well for me:
* WORK
** Project A
*** DONE Create project costing :Laptop:
*** NEXT Ring Jim to check the costings are OK. : Phone:
*** Check we can fit the project into June/July :John:
*** Hand project over to John
*** Check project progress
SCHEDULED: <2008-6-30 Mon>
As you can see, the beauty of org-mode is that
- you can store everything related to a project together (which was one of the discussion points in theGTD Times post)
- both my next steps and ‘next’ next steps are visible to me when I do my weekly review.
- Only the NEXT action will come up when I use the appropriate key combo (‘^Cas’ in my case, which is one of my org-agenda-custom-commands and pulls up anything which is a NEXT action and which has a work-related tag, such as :Laptop: etc).
- finally (and this, i think, illustrates why org-mode works so well), when doing the weekly review, if I have made the phone call, I hit ^C^T on the NEXT line to convert it to DONE, and then make a decision if one of the other steps is a next action. If it is, just move onto that line and hit ^C^T. Seamless.
Now the post also discusses the problems with cluttering up your lists with stuff you don’t need to focus on at the moment, but with org-mode this isn’t an issue as you can set up your various filters to show you as much or as little as you want.