At work now, I'll reply by Friday, June 6th.

I am looking forward to reading Doug's reply too!

1. The primary reason I use Lists to Collect tasks instead of Smart Lists is that in reality, all tasks must live on some List, even if that's your Inbox List. Having all my tasks on my Inbox List is too confusing. If I were to forget a Tag or mis-Tag a task, it would lost among the 150 other tasks on my Inbox List.

Having separate Lists for Projects allows me to capture all the tasks for a given project even though not all of them are Next Actions. My Work and Personal Smart Lists show me all Next Actions across all of my personal and work projects.

Mainly though, after much trial and error this is the system which works for me. I welcome suggestions for improvement.

2. I created a sample account and deliberately kept the examples simple since the post was already complicated enough.

I have had up to 25-30 projects without the system feeling too unweildly, but I agree, 100+ projects would probably be too many tabs.

I'm curious how you would even keep track of 100 projects in any system. Are they all active projects? I archive or delete Project Lists when the project is completed so it keeps the number of Lists down to a manageable number.

3. It's true that RTM doesn't have a way of saving a template List with pre-made tasks but you can create repeating Tasks (repeat every month for example).

I wonder if part of the challenge is that your tasks are too granular ("download the csv, categorize, etc..."). I don't take David Allen's 2 minute rule too literally, i.e. every thing which takes longer than 2 minutes should map to one RTM Task. You really will end up with too many tasks and feel overwhelmed.

I've been doing GTD with RTM for about a year now and I have a pretty good gut feeling of when several related little 2-10 min tasks should be represented with a single RTM Task. As a silly example, "Bake pie for dinner" would be a single RTM Task, even though it encompassed many smaller tasks (1. make pie dough, 2. make filling, 3. assemble pie, 4. bake, 5. cool, etc.).

Doug,

Thank you for your comprehensive response.

In regards to response #2 - you're right I have about 20-30 active projects and a ton of them under someday/maybe (separated as for month (which I review weekly) and one someday/maybe for year which I review every 6 months).

In regards to response #3 - it is true that one can take the 2 minute discrete tasks to an extreme. In the case of the example I gave, the tasks were indeed separate (i.e. if I have a few minutes, I'll download the csv at one point, if I have some time at another point, I'll categorize the charges, etc...). I suppose that one solution/hack would be to put the overall task as the name and use the note field as the place for discrete tasks (- for not done and + for done).

From what you've indicated, I assume you put work related tasks and are not worried about privacy/proprietary issues (I asked a question about this topic in this forum but got no responses). I assume that when you do this - the task names are specific enough to remind you of what you need to know for your work but general enough not to matter to anyone who saw the task.

Thanks so much for your comprehensive response and thank you for taking the time to write a clear and well illustrated explanation of how you applied GTD to RTM.

ewrk

Ewrk,

For #3 it sounds like what you want is what Doug first mentioned - recurring tasks. I have several tasks related to one project that I have to repeat weekly and I just have one list for that project with those tasks set to repeat weekly on a certain day of the week. This works well for me, and I think it would work well for the credit card payment/data project you mentioned.

Not to hijack this thread, but I have a related question:
Would there be a way to show single-item tasks and next actions from projects in the same place? I recall the one-place-to-check-tasks as being a big help, at least for me.

I agree with the original poster

the system described wouldn't work with even 15 projects, but most people have up to 80-100 if they are thorough

I'm currently puzzling over issues around question 2. Not so much the number of projects as the structure - I currently use Thinking Rock to track these things and it allows me to create sub projects within a project (or within a sub-project, depending on how much granularity you can handle).

That means the top level project (or lists in this example) can be kept to a manageable number, but other than via tagging or convoluted naming conventions, the sub projects can't be so easily structured - unless anyone's got a more elegant solution?

One service I have been trying to implement in my daily life and help me complete and organize tasks at home, work, and on the web is Remember The Milk. I think it is a great service that if used right can be a powerful tool to keep things flowing.
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Linc

Trivia Game Challenge

I read through Doug's post today and it motivated me to change my RTM-GTD setup. I'd hacked together a bunch of smartlists with just one regular list. What Doug said was true - mostly my stuff was getting lost because I rarely looked at the huge catch-all list and really only looked at my smartlist that had time-specific tasks. While this helped to get items done that had to get done by X day, it didn't really help me progress at all with my growing list of things I would like to get done. So I thought I'd try out Doug's system and see how it went. It didn't take a huge amount of time to convert (maybe an hour or a bit more), but I'm still a little shaky on how certain things might work:

#1: I guess I'm not sure exactly what is meant by a daily list, except that it contains things that are not part of a "project." This has gotten me thinking about what is a "project." Certain things are obvious, like "Buy a house" or "create a website," but I have a lot of things that while you can kind of group them together and categorize them in some way (e.g. home improvement /garden / home video /etc.), I'm not sure if they constitute a "project." I know this might seem pretty basic, but I feel like I don't understand how a grouping called a "project" is different from simply a category grouping?

#2: Doug, you seem to use priority levels, but you don't address them in your article. From what I recall from the book, David Allen deemphesizes priorities because he feels they are too arbitrary. Just wondering why/how you see this differently?

#3: Maybe due to #1, I'm still seeing a fairly large list for ps-Daily. I've only set up a few project lists and I'm not even sure they should be called projects, so I'm hoping that a good definition will push this list down to a reasonable level

#4: I see that you don't seem to be doing anything with due dates, time estimates, or "energy level." It seems like at least due dates would be a useful smartlist to add to this, ie - show all tasks that have a due date associated with them, and perhaps in addition you could say only due within X days. I actually have been tagging tasks with a special tag that I use to hide tasks with due dates unless they are within a certain amount. So I'll tag task A with "zzz7d" and Task B as "zzz3d" If both are due in 5 days, only the Task A will show up in the smartlist. I've also tried to tag things with an energy level like @@low, @@medium, and @@high, but despite setting up a smartlist for this, it doesn't seem to do much for me, and neither does the time estimate. It helps to actually THINK about how long something is going to take, but I realize that many of these are wild guesses, and again the smartlist I had set up for this doesn't seem to get used.

#5: I understand how to use your "na" in a project list, but you seem to use it in PS-Daily, and you actually have multiple tasks with this tag in that list - at least on the screen shot. I'm wondering what that actually signifies? Shouldn't there be just one "na" per list? The whole idea of "na" for just a list of non-project tasks is a bit confusing to me as well. I guess you can just pick one task to be the next one you want to get done, I think David Allen says something about using your intuition with that. Still, if you are spending much of your time within this more general list, it almost seems silly to mark something as "na" just to then start doing it, but maybe I'm missing something...

#6: for Someday tasks, it seems like you are segregating these by putting them in their own lists. I'm wondering again in the context of my earlier questions about projects vs. categories how this would work. If I have a grouping (say gardening) and one of my tasks in that grouping is something I just don't think I will have the time/energy to do for long time, then I should put that into the Someday list. However, it is then "ungrouped" from the gardening grouping. So if I have that grouping as a project, this will not show up. Does that mean that gardening shouldn't be a project at all, or simply that tasks that you don't think you will be able to get to any time soon, are too ambitious, and/or not vital to a project, should be cordoned off in order not to distract one from getting done with a project?

In any case, thanks for the great article. It's definitely made me think a lot more about how I should organize tasks, set up RTM, and just how to think about all this stuff in general. I think while adding a bit of clutter at the top of the page, using lists in addition to smartlists can give an added dimension of filtering that doesn't require very complex search query statements. I've been using the various greasemonkey scripts to set up a tag cloud that makes projects and such out of prefixes used before a tag, and while this has worked fairly well, my only concern is portability. If I even have to look at RTM via a computer that doesn't have these scripts installed or on my phone, the functionality doesn't quite work the same...