Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked so frequently that I decided to write about it.
Why is “Get mom a birthday present” a project and not a task?
GTD is very orthodox in what a “project” is: it’s anything that:
- you think you’ll complete in the next year
- requires more than one step to complete.
I used to think this was an overly broad definition for things like “buy mom a present”, “install weight rack”, etc and would just have them sit as tasks.
Over the past year, though, I've come to realize that this was not quite ideal. It's hard to read "buy mom a present" as a task when I'm looking for something idly to do between meetings or during weekly review; it's discrete, sure, but not so immediately actionable that I know exactly what to do or when to sequence it. (This is in contrast with, say, "buy mom a signed copy of Piranesi", where the action is clear and the time required is obvious.)
So: more things have become "projects". This has a couple second-order effects:
- I'm forced to actually think about what the next step is for these smaller things, which is useful — especially the past month, where with Lucy the amount of executive function and mental capacity I have to actually do something is pretty limited.
- At any point in time I have more projects active than I am used to, which is of course Not Ideal (context switching is hard! work in progress is bad!) but also truer than pretending I only ever have two or three things bouncing around my head at any given time.
(Again: none of this stuff has inherent merit; it's only useful insofaras it lets me spend my time more effectively and calm my mind so that I can focus on what I'm doing at any given point in time. But GTD does do those things, at least for me.)
