As @ediventurin said, I changed my someday/maybe review cycle to a longer review cycle.
All of my new projects are automatically set to on hold project status and the review cycle set to 1 month or longer. Very few new projects are immediately set to active unless it is time sensitive and needs to be done immediately or within the next few weeks.
Whenever I set a project status to active, I will change the review cycle to a shorter review cycle.
Active pojects that have tasks changing constantly will have a review interval of 1-3 days. Otherwise, I am content to setting the review cycle to 1 week.
Someday/maybe projects are my backlog and donāt need a lot of handholding. I can check back monthly or quarterly to see if I need to do something with these inactive projects.
Single Action Lists that are Admin/routine in nature will always have an active project status. These lists take up a big chunk of my time.
I have only a small handful of projects set to active status. Iāll usually have 3-5 active projects. It might be a mix of 2 work projects and 1 personal/home/family project or some other combination.
The only projects that will need a shorter review cycle are the admin/routine lists and the 3-5 active projects. Everything else is set to be reviewed on a monthly basis,
lolā¦ Iām talking about setting most of my personal projects to on hold immediately. At work (or heck, even my marriage), I donāt always have a say in the decision making.
About half of my work projects are immediately set to active because the boss demanded results yesterday even though the e-mail came in this morning. But I do have some say in what other important but not urgent projects can be set to on hold. I can typically negotiate with my wife about what house/family projects can be active and what goes into the backlog.
So I can understand a lot of work stuff will be automatically active. But sometimes negotiating with the boss can help.
Iāve used this tactic of asking the boss āI have three projects and you just added another project to my workload. Which project(s) do you want me to put on the back burner so that I can work on your new emergency? Which project can I delegate to someone else? Or which project can I just delete?ā Iāll let the boss have a say in what to take down (with some helpful suggestions from me of course).
Of course, our life varies and we may not have a choice in certain parts of our lives. But at least give your immediate supervisor the choice of what project to de-prioritize and which project to escalate to First Priority. Itās scary at first to challenge the boss but sometimes itās a necessary action to take for our own sanity.
In the end, we use the review to determine which projects should be done first, which ones can be delegated, which ones can be deleted, and/or which ones can be ignored. Which project will bring the best reward-to-cost ratio. Projects with low returns should be delegated away or deleted. Projects with high returns should be kept. Using the review workflow will help us determine how we prioritize our projects.
I canāt imagine you have only 3-5 active projects covering your life and work active at any given time. Do you use OF for tracking everything? As someone with typically between 250-300 active projects at one time only having 3-5 would mean I am on my deathbed trying to tie up the last few loose ends before I kick the bucket!
The only way I can see that is if you consider a project an AOF and have sub projects within it for all the things that relate to that area.
Can you explain how you handle the rest of life with so little in your OF system?
I also put many of my large set of projects on hold. I still consider them in progress (for lack of a better classification). Perhaps a different example will help clarify. A project that I put on hold is not the same as one that I set as dropped. The former still receives routine reviews. That latter is archived or trashed.
Suppose we take the three categories of project status according to OF: active, on hold, and dropped. In the active set, letās subdivide to āin progressā and āpendingā. Any project where the first available task is for someone else to complete is āpendingā.
Take ONE DAY (today). Discount all āpendingā projects. IOW, remove all projects where the ball is in someone elseās court. Keep track only of the active āin progressā projects. At the end of the day, how many of them did you actually advance? Advance specifically means this: You COMPLETED at least one task in the project. Tally up the total. Consider this thought in review. Those projects that were āin progressā at the start of the day and that you did not advance explicitly by the end of the day are ones that you put on hold implicitly throughout the day.
With this insight, here is the idea. You allowed the choice to put something on hold to be entirely implicit (and by extension perhaps rather random or āspur of the momentā). Why not make most of decision to put stuff āon holdā an explicit choice at the start of the day? In your morning review, decide which āin progressā projects are likely not to be advanced in the day ahead. Better still, decide which ones of that set are likely not to be advanced for a few days or longer. Put that latter set of projects āon holdā. Of course, you would also be bringing āon holdā projects back to āin progressā status during the same review.
Can you explain how you handle just one day with so much in your OF system?
The difference is likely not about what each of us have in our OF systems. I would bet that we are about the same in this case. The difference is likely to be how each of us approach the review, setup, and doing stages of our work given our database of active (in progress or pending) and on hold projects in OF.
I think a key element here comes down to what OF means to you and the role it plays in your life.
To me, OF is the inventory of things I want suggested to me as options when looking for pre-processed tasks. In other words, while I may factually be working on projects A, B, and C in real life, if I donāt want OF to present me options about them when I am looking for processed work I can do, I will put those projects on Hold. The state projects have in OF, for me, does not have to map to reality. In this way, I keep my available options in OF reviews to a minimum.
Iāve also taken to doing two weekly reviews:
Executive Monday - here, I do a traditional Weekly Review, with all the component of Get Clear, Get Current, and Get Creative, while also creating tasks in each of my active projects with an On Hold Context of āGoalā. These tasks represent where I want this project to be at the end of the week. I focus on Projects that have outcomes and my Domains (areas of responsibility). Checklists and someday/maybe projects get skimmed, and are more thoroughly reviewed on monthly/quarterly basis.
Reflection Friday - here, I review progress against each of the goals, hopefully mark them as complete, and then prep content, information, and things for the Monday review.
YMMV, just thought Iād share some of my process.
OK Itās about noon here so my day is half over. Iām in for a quick break, lunch then will head out to continue working my predefined list of things to do. So far this morning Iāve finished next actions for 9 different projects. I worked on a further 4 projects that are now completely finished and checked off as done. Looking at my context lists I have a bunch of things to do in town and after my calendar review this morning I know that this afternoon is the only time I can get away from the farm to run errands this entire week so after lunch thatās where Iām headed. I just looked and the actions I can do in town will move a further 6 projects forward. Depending on how long it takes to run errands in town my next largest context that is inside only is work on LambTracker. Itās a programming job so unlikely Iāll get even a single next action completed before itās time to do evening chores and get dinner going.
This morning I took 15 minutes while I drank my coffee to look at the weather radar, my calendar and then my lists of actions by contexts. A bunch of my āactiveā projects have a next action that is in a context of Waiting For so would be more like your use of Pending. I use Start Dates for the real Pending projects which for me are ones I cannot even start on until a certain date. Another rather large group depends on the availability of my husband to help and heās working on something else today so those are not in a context I can even move to today. I have both inside and outside contexts with his help that I sort my actions into. Since he is unavailable I didnāt even look at those contexts. Then there is a group for the city context, again a context I canāt go to today. We wonāt make our monthly shopping trip to the city for another 2 weeks or so. I donāt even need to look at that context for now. All those projects are not going to be moving forward. Another rather large bunch of projects have next actions that are weather dependent. Weāve had snow overnight and I could see a storm cell moving in so I decided to work in my outside contexts until it arrived. We also had some time critical sheep work to do today that included collecting data on the times individual sheep were given a shot. Itās part of this yearās sheep AI experiment. That was on my calendar. Working sheep can depend a bit on sheep attitudes so I had to allow for extra time in case they were unwilling. They all cooperated and I actually had to wait around for quite a while until it was time to start the procedure. I couldnāt really do anything else while I waited as I had sheep in the sweep. I did what I could in the outside contexts before and after the sheep work. Itās snowing now so I canāt do any more outside stuff and itās close to lunch so I came in.
As to why not flip them to on-hold each morning it takes far longer to do that than to leave them active. I have my contexts well defined and that gives me the granularity I need to reduce what I have to look at each day.
At this rate I fully expect to have moved forward or completed at least 19 different projects today and I may try to do a few things more after dinner.
Sounds as though you make good use of what you have. I might suggest a few variations. For example, when you say you wonāt make a shopping trip for 2 months or so ā¦ that context should be set as inactive. When you are ready to go shopping, reactive it. It is equivalent to my āerrandsā context that I only activate when I can leave for errands. Also, when you say your husband is not available today and you need his help, that is to me yet another context that for me gets put to an inactive state. Or it is pending.
Duly noted. I use context granularity as well.
So, what about the yearly project to do the Spring Cleaning in the Barn? Is that ACTIVE or ON HOLD right now? When you say it is active ā¦ why??? Why not set it on hold, set a review for the start of when you can do the project, and toggle it back active.
This is the approach that I take with my projects. I have to start setting up to teach my Spring courses. I have a set of templates all ready for the boiler-plate items in this list. But ā¦ I have them all on hold and will refuse to activate them until I am darn well ready to start them.
One other difference strikes me. I have a lot of open-ended tasks. For example, as I am writing a paper, I have to do the literature review. This is not a āshear the sheepā project where you know it will take four hours and you can move on. This is a āget the thing done rightā project where it drags on as a review of each new paper opens up the potential to find three more relevant papers that you had not even realized existed until then.
So, I will not get 19 projects done today. I am rather glad that I just got one done well. I completed a review cycle to generate a new version of the paper - a version that is now the pre-release.
The difference then is, our workloads have a different structure to them. Therefore, our use of OF must have a different structure to it.
To set a context inactive isnāt possible on the iPhone, as far as I know. I work from my iPhone most of the time. So Iād have to set it inactive on my mac, sync and then hope nothing changed that meant I could actually go to the context. The shopping one is perhaps not the best example, but the one with help is. I thought Iād not be able to work with my husband at all this afternoon, but his stuff was finished faster than expected so we had time. Instead of the things I was planning I just quickly pulled up the contexts that need his assistance and off we went. Itās seems more fluid and agile to have lots of choice. I donāt like the constraints of limiting my options the way you describe because in my workflow I can see it causing huge issues. The bottom line is do what works.
I still donāt understand how you only have 3-5 projects active at one time. My suggestion to you is to try keeping everything you might be able to work on this month active and see how much more you actually accomplish. I used to be more strict and only keep things I thought I would do in the coming week active figuring that Iād review at my weekly review and find more to add. What I found was that instead of helping me it limited me. At the end of the week Iād look at projects I wanted to get done this farming season and realize that I could have done something on them that week even though I didnāt think Iād be able to. They were hidden by being on hold or inactive. I missed many opportunities to move things along. Now I keep everything I might want to or possibly could work on in the current 3 month seasonal period active and itās amazing how many more things get conceived of, planned and completed that way.
Spring Cleaning in the Barn is not active in the sense I use it although it shows up in the āActiveā group in the OF scripts report. Projects with a future start date are listed separately as āpendingā. Itās a project that can only be started after the sheep go out on pasture which is never before shearing which is at the end of March. So I have that particular group of projects (we have 2 barns) set with a start date of April 1 so itās a pending project. Not on hold but one that is waiting for a start date or is a tickled project. Itās not an āActiveā project for me right now.
I too have many open ended projects. I totally understand the literature search one, Iām working on a book and each chapter requires rather significant research. I can spend hours just researching a few things. I donāt really know what Iāll find or how long that action will take. (I have one action for researching for each chapter) Similarly as we are writing up our research papers to be submitted for publication there are reviews and searches for other papers that will take an unknown amount of time. Even the data analysis is not really well bounded.
Programming tasks are also nearly always very open ended. I have an action sitting in my active LambTracker development project right now that says āBug-ID Management cannot add more than 1 tag at a time if one is an EID tagā I have absolutely no clue how long it will take to find and fix that problem.
Then again even farming things are also rather open ended. Setting up irrigation may only take a few hours one year but might take several days the next if during the winter cattle or wildlife broke something or smashed the ditch banks down.
BTW I didnāt get 19 projects done, I only got the 4 done that I mentioned previously but I moved 18 forward and completed 4. Having help changed what I worked on this afternoon.
I honestly have a lot more active projects than just 3-5. But, I also have a lot of on hold projects as well. The choice between them is one that I make up front and on purpose.
Perhaps the better perspective is this. I see no reason for every Project I have to be active by default. In fact, I almost think a better approach is to decide that Projects have to earn the right to be active rather than on hold. IOW, the default should be on hold until I decide the Project really is something that I can close (complete in its entirety) in a foreseeable time frame.
By foreseeable time frame, I mean in the next week or two. My mind goes to slush when I think too far beyond that in terms of actually completing something all the way through. Another part of my approach here is also to break Projects with Action Groups. I do this to make them āeatableā in reasonable time slices. Here, I think in terms of a few days.
Letās come back to the sense of this thread before we diverge too much further. The goal of a review for me is to keep my daily action list in sync with my abilities and projections at that time. Daily, weekly, and semesterly (an academic calendar is my bigger clock) ā I do reviews. At each review, I set Projects on hold to keep them out of my way until I know that I can really do something with them. I move other Projects from on hold to active because I must or want to do something on them.
I have lots of open-ended Projects on hold simply because I have no plans or immediate needs to advance them right now. But, most assuredly, when something clicks for them, they will become active again.
Absent this approach, my head would hurt from looking at too many tasks at one time.
wowā¦ woke up this morning to the thread and saw the interesting conversation that happened while I was sleeping.
I realize that I have a limited capacity that I have to work with. I use the review to zoom in on the really important projects. Iāll have several projects in different states of pending (waiting for someone else or waiting for me to do).
I already have a lot of active lists (the routine/admin stuff such as Home Single Actions, Family Single Actions, Work Single Actions, etc.).
But I know that on this day, I will probably get to focus on three major projects at most. Iāll finish a variety of small one-off actions from the single actions lists but Iāll be working on making major progress on the 3-5 active projects that I want done.
I guess Iāve adopted the practice of just knocking off the three frontmost projects that are on my plate. If I have fifty projects in various states of completion, Iāll want to do a little progress in the āon holdā projects - maybe one task from these inactive projects. But Iāll want to focus my efforts on the 3-5 active projects. I figured if I have three projects completed, Iāll only have forty seven projects to worry. But if I nibble on all of these projects, Iāll still be in a state of crazy because I will still have fifty projects left undone. If I can get down to forty seven projects, I can work on the next three projects and make those active. Then Iāll complete those and Iāll have forty three projects left. The less tennis balls I have juggling in the air, the better I feel.
When Iām talking about active projects, maybe the better term is āBig Rocks.ā Iāll have the small one-off actions from the single action lists completed but I need to knock off the three big rocks as quickly as possible.
I do a lot of what @DrJJWMac does and donāt need to repeat it with my post.
I think there was an old quote floating around the internet: donāt mistake being busy with being productive. There will be days that I will have completed one hundred tasks and still feel like I didnāt make progress on the projects that really matter. Iāll feel better if I actually completed three Big Rocks as compared to completing one hundred nonsense tasks that may be important but it feels like Iām just treading water.
In the end, I review to simplify. Anything that doesnāt help me keep my job or make my life easier is just nonsense. Whenever someone else wants to give me a project, it either becomes my problem or not my problem.
You can go to the contexts perspective. Tap on a context to drill down into that contextās list. Then click on the context itself to get more info about the context. In this scene, you can change the title, status, and GPS location her.
The iPad and Mac versions are fairly similar. Go to context perspective, click on the context in the main outline and then change the info there.
Thanks for thatI had never seen that so didnāt know it was possible. I do nearly all my work on the mac and use the ios versions just for doing so usually only clicking done happens there.
Ah light dawns perhaps, I donāt use action groups or sub-projects at all. I donāt like more than at most 2 layers of structure so I prefer large flat lists. So chunks that you describe as action groups for me would be whole separate projects, perhaps pending perhaps with the first action of Waiting for completion of Project Y" and active it varies but I typically donāt have sub groups within projects.
I agree that projects should be on-hold by default but in my world many of those wonāt ever make it to my OF system at all. They tend to live as one-line text descriptions in a DEVONThink note in the appropriate Someday/Maybe list.
It seems like a basic difference in comfort levels and how we approach keeping on top of stuff. I am uncomfortable when I have too few projects. I flail about and never get stuff done if I donāt have the exact mindset or time to do the action I can cycle through my context lists looking for something I can actually do. When I have a huge number of projects active and many tiny discrete actions in well defined and delineated context lists with varying levels of mental energy and time needed I find that reassuring. No matter how much time I have or how I feel I can easily and painlessly decide what to work on. I can always find something that will move a project forward no matter what context I am or how braindead or limited my time is.
The goal of a quick daily review for me is to see what contexts need attention and within the constraints of weather and my calendar decide which ones I can move to and work in this day. The purpose of my weekly review is to clean up loose ends, mark projects and actions complete, if any projects are hanging on with no action for a while I re-evaluate the planning, usually it means the next action I have identified isnāt well defined or isnāt really the next action or the project itself is really a whole bunch of related projects. In which case I split them out and decide if they are all needing to be active now or not. My quarterly reviews are for looking at the whole galaxy of potential projects and deciding if they are all still ones that fit in with my long term goals and purpose in life. If not they go away but if they are then they get vetted for possible activation. My own sense of what I want available and my comfort with long lists of possibilities works for me, but it clearly doesnāt work for lots of folks.
There will be times where I will create a folder for a massive undertaking. Then I create projects inside that folder that represents each phase. I will put every project in this folder on hold except the first one. The very last task in each project will be titled āactivate next project of my major goalā.
Folder: Send a man to the moon
project: recruit astronauts (training, psych evaluations)
Project: build rocket ship
Project: prepare astronaut training
Project: create moon landing computer database module
Etc., etc., etc.
I might have one or two of these sub projects going on simultaneously, I can work on the database module and the recruitment stage at the same time. It the overall project is still āsend a man to the moon.ā
It often helps to break down something large into smaller, more manageable lists. This makes the review process for this large folder easier.
As an off-topic aside, it sounds like you might be born in the Chinese year of the Horse. The Horse has multiple projects always going on concurrently. They are easily restless when there is nothing to do and will actively find new endeavors. They sometimes must take care to not overload their cart with too many projects but they usually find a way to get things done.
This is the opposite of someone born in the year of the Or who likes to focus on one project to completion.
Consider a Taurus born in the year of the Monkey. I playfully climb the tree when everything says that I absolutely shouldnāt and then I stubbornly sit there wondering why I did it in the first place! š š
lolā¦ i think i accidentally hijacked this thread. I wonāt say anything more about astrology being a Pig myself with a Monkey wife to help keep my OmniFocus Honey-Do list fullā¦ Hopefully weāll get back on topic before we become a zooā¦ ;-)
Looking at my currently available next actions, I have 63 in my āAvailableā perspective. These come from various single action lists and active projects. Out of the 63, I see 16 next actions that are either due today or due within the next 7 days. I typically try to work on the overdue/due today/due soon tasks first. Then Iāll try to knock off a few of my flagged tasks which usually comes from the routine/admin/maintenance lists or projects. At the moment, I have 23 flagged next actions available for me to do. These are not due but necessary to keep the Machine of Life running smoothly.
While I am trying to juggle the various single next actions, I want to get to 3-5 Big Rock projects that I am hyper-focused on and would like to gain major progress or actually completing them.
This is what I meant I am using the Review workflow to get to the important stuff. Of course, I have leeway to move various projects going by checking off one or two tasks. I might do that depending on how I feel but I am more apt to just get major progress in the 3-5 Big Rocks.
