I’m sort of new to this GTD methodology and am struggling on the best way to manage a project.
I am a web developer. We have releases of of web app every 6 months or so. We use JIRA to manage the team, and have “stories” for all the things that are going into the next release. Many of those stories are assigned to me, and each story usually has multiple tasks – which could be sequential or parallel.
For example, I have a story “tech debt”, which has 9 tasks in it which I’d like to track.
Current I set up a project for “release 3” due in August, with action groups for each story and actions within for each task in the story.
Is this the most efficient and logical way to do this, or should I make projects out of each story?
IMHO, the best way to organize the tasks is that way that gets them off your mind because they make sense to you and trust that you have them arranged in a fashion you can understand.
In GTD parlance, a project is just a thing you want done that isn’t done yet - your OF organization doesn’t have to map to JIRA or the way others work, it just has to capture your incomplete tasks and act as a trigger for what tasks should be added as you review your project list.
JIRA is your collaboration space, but your OF is just yours, so feel free to call it as you see fit. There isn’t one universal right way, there is the way that works best for you.
The only thing that might be of concern is if/how you look at historical/completed things. Because folders can’t be “completed” (though they can be dropped), and you might not want to delete them (because that would remove your project and task history), it might be worthwhile to add a Completed or Archived or Deprecated (or whatever you want to call it) folder, and then drag release folders in to it upon completion. That way, you keep a full history, but can exclude the folder from any active work areas.
