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RTM and Project Management

robert.besaw says:
I applaud many of you out there that are using RTM as a project management tool. I have been trying to decide if it is the right thing for me to leverage for Project management as opposed to task management.

In my personal and work life I have so many tools I am required to use I decided to not incur further complication by trying to retrofit something that it was not intended for. No offense meant for those that use it that way.

I work in a MS project and Outlook environment at work and my wife thrives off of her notebook of projects and tasks (that drives me crazy since she has an RTM account and an iPhone). I use Project and my wife's notebook to manage the deliverables and I leverage outlook and gmail to manage immediate tasks from email. Those that aren't done right away are then forwarded to my RTM address so that I continue to track them after the day is done and my email inbox is kept clean. I use generic lists i.e. work, home, family, house, etc and then like many of you I leverage tags to assign project related information and contexts to them.

I make concerted effort to not over complicate it as I know that I have a tendency to stop using something if it becomes a burden to use or longer to setup and use than the task itself.

Project Milestones are important but they are milestones, not tasks and I leave those in our project plans or on our calendars as due dates.

As for next next steps and other types of GTD concepts, if it's a task that is new I wait until it's done to think of that. If it's a project plan, then those next next things are thought out in advance and scheduled tasks that I track in RTM.

All of this being said I do have a list of projects that I haven't started but that will be done at some point (i.e. remodel kitchen). Those have a due date of when I have to start working on them.

I have to say I love RTM and while some of the other task managers have more functionality - they tend to try to be all things to all people. Which in turn over complicates the whole process.
Posted at 9:51pm on August 1, 2009
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