Discrete Actions

(This isn’t going to turn into another “43 Folders” site, I promise, but I had typed this up and didn’t want to just delete it)

After three months of “Getting Things Done” I was ready for a minor re-assessment of my system and slight debugging. I found a great set of core articles that gave me a few things to think about.

One of the biggest problems I was having was “stale” actions that I just wasn’t making any progress on. I think this is because there were a lot of projects hiding out as actions. Things like “Draft Ethics Paper”. I kept skipping it over because it seemed like too Herculean of a task. So I’ve created some new action review rules for myself:

• Confirm they are all physical actions (being each with a verb…not “think”)
• Scan for actions that may be projects (take > 30 minutes)
• If needed, break actions into segments
• Make sure each action has a quantifiable goal
• Make sure there is nothing blocking each action

This helps turn the above sisyphean “Draft Paper” action into something like:

• Offline: Select Ethics paper topics
• Study: Outline Ethics topic #1
• Study: Outline Ethics topic #2
• Study: Draft Ethics topic #1
• Study: Draft Ethics topic #2
• Result: Ethics Paper 1 – Individual Ethics

Much better for my limited chunks of mental time I get throughout the day. Now I need to refine the way I’m managing very large projects that have a lot of interaction with other people.

Thanks for listening to me geek out about this.