I am still experimenting but at the moment it’s something like this:
- I have a separate document for different areas of my life (Personal; 2 different jobs; extra stuff like writing / blogging) - I have set it up this way mostly as when I search my whole document for e.g. urgency 1 tasks I REALLY like the visual separation between different documents (please don’t ever remove this dynalist) - it really prevents mental overload I find
- Within each of these documents, I have top level bullets for each project in that area of life (If they are time based, I have a due date).
I also have a tag for every ‘major’ project (vaguely defined by me) - I use fixed prefixes depending on each area of life so e.g. @pp- is the start of every personal project (at the moment I am applying for new jobs so I have one called @pp-newjob) - these are very important so that you can tag things across your whole document (e.g. a scrap bit of information you come across, or your dynalist calendar (if you have one (you should have one)) - Regarding those top level project bullets, I put a > before each one, so the newjob one has: > @pp-newjob - I do this so that I can easily ‘move’ items there in an instant (the name is unique but memorable) - I also turn the arrow around like this < for completed projects - that allows me to find archived stuff easily (which I put in a separate archive document) - Oh I also have a > @pp-misc for random little personal things which aren’t big enough to be their own projects …
- Each of these project documents is organised differently depending on the project - for really big projects I may have a kanban layout with To Do, Ongoing, Waiting, Done etc … (I have this for the kind of projects where I tend to sit down and do it for a few hours at a time like e.g. major write ups … So the project itself has the urgency label, and when I go there the things that need doing are handled internally (i.e. they don’t show up in my general search)
- Smaller projects are often just a messy jumble of #notes #thoughts, tasks etc … when it’s like this usually the tasks will carry the urgency label themselves
- As I just mentioned in another post, it is very important that at your GTD weekly review every single project gets a well defined next action, a context tag for that next action and has the appropriate urgency (also important of course you check e.g. your calendar to make sure you know all your projects coming up)
- Finally, RE those context tags I just talked about - I actually don’t use Dave Allen’s #home #offline etc - I use more natural ones like #read #write #research … these are actually ‘task types’, not contexts - however, I know what contexts I can do each of these things in (I can only write at my laptop and can only generally research online as I am very digital) so I have created a series of saved searches for different contexts (e.g. I have a phone search for #email OR #reply OR #call etc) - I also have other searches defined by how difficult the tasks are, so I can match tasks to my cognitive levels throughout the day … e.g. writing is quite hard, research medium, reading easy (for me at least) … the benefit in my approach here I think is that when I create a new task it comes very easily to mind whether it’s a #write or #read task (these are often part of the natural language of the task) but requires a fair amount of effort sometimes to think about what the context is - I have generally found that when assigning context is difficult I just don’t do it … my context system 90% just flows naturally without any thought
I think that mostly covers it