Help with project structure please?
 

I have a folder 'Music' which holds all my musical projects.
(I'm a musician)
One of my activities is to be part of a team called 'The Real Music Network' (RMN)

... so I have a project 'RMN'

RMN has people and projects, one of which is a festival in November.

The Festival has a number of facets:
o Acts (expensive)
o Local musos (cheap)
o Publicity
o Marketing ( CDs, posters, DVDs; a stall)
o People ( some of the team:RMN; then local techies; hall staff; security; local government and more)

o Inviting list
o The workshops I might lead
o The bands I might play with

I'm having trouble conceptualising how to structure these in OF.

Any ideas?

peter

Hi Peter,

it sounds like the RMN thing is much more than a project, rather an "Area of Responsibility" (i.e., it's nothing to be finished in the foreseeable future, but an ongoing thing in your life). Thus, I would create a folder for RMN and then put related projects in this folder. This can be a subfolder of "Music" to reflect the hierarchy. You could now also create a subfolder in RMN for each larger project (the festival) to group projects related to this particular festival.

For each of the festival facets you can create single projects ("Marketing", "Publicity", "Prepare for Act X", "Prepare for Act Y", "Prepare for Act Z"). For each workshop you can create also a project "Prepare Workshop X", or a single project "Organize Workshops". The inviting list can be realized as an action group in e.g. the Publicity project:

- [Project] Publicity
-- [Parallel Action Group] Send invitations
--- [Action] Alice
--- [Action] Bob
--- [Action] John

Regarding the people and bands: Actions involving the local government could be either "Discuss parking management with local police @ Errands" or you create a context for the local authority if you expect to work with them a lot. Creating new contexts for every little thing messes up your contexts list - however, you can organize it hierarchically to clean things up again and you can drop (or delete) contexts when not needed anymore. So, to be specific, your contexts list might look like this:

- Home
- RMN
-- Bob
-- Peter
- Band A
- Band B
- Festival Town
-- Government
-- Tech Crew
-- Local Band C

You can also assign actions to "RMN" if you have things to address in group meeting, for example.

However, having said all this, it could well be that a flat project folder hierarchy and a flat contexts list suits you much better. Personally, for people I only have a "People" and a "Boss" context and specify details in the action text, i.e. "Ask Bob to help me with XY @ People". And two weeks ago I cleaned up my folder hierarchy to only contain "Goals", "Personal", "Work" and "Science" (I am a scientist - "Work" contains projects which are not scientific per se but rather administrative or supportive for my "Science" projects).

I realized that I cannot keep progress in N areas of my life simultaneously, so I narrowed the list down and only keep a bunch of projects active at the same time. In my weekly review I put projects on hold or activate them depending on which I want to work on next week. Showing active projects only during weekdays then shows a simple and non-overwhelming list of projects that are important this week.

Oh, and you might want to break down larger projects as well - for example instead of having a "Marketing" project with "CD" and "DVD" action groups you might as well create two projects "Festival X Marketing: CD" and "Festival X Marketing: DVD". This way you can put them on hold independently to narrow down the amount of currently active things and (most importantly) you get more rewarding "Project Completed" clicks in the same time. ;-)

Ok, enough text for now... hope this helps,
Christian

In addition to the advice above, I would probably do a brain dump of every task I could think of for the festival ("Investigate poster printers" "Ask Joe about the artist he used for Widget Festival poster", etc., etc., etc.). You can then tuck the tasks into the structure that you've created using Christian's advice, and if any don't fit, then you have a head start on figuring out what you need to add to the structure.

Gardener

Keep it goal-oriented
 

Also, it helps to keep the project titles task-oriented. So, for example, "Marketing" isn't a project, because it doesn't have a clear goal or point of completion. You need to have a point where you can check off the project as done, and marketing will never be done. Instead, make a sub-folder for "Marketing", and in that folder have projects titled "Print New Posters" or "Obtain Newspaper Interview", etc.... Each of those projects would have a next action, which is even more task-oriented, like "Call Bob", etc.

> "Marketing" isn't a project

that's cleared a lot up for me, thanks

peter

thanks Christian for your detailed suggestions, and gardener for your comment - much to think about - will let you know how it goes

peter

PS. I posted a reply on friday but it isn't here in the forum - are there issues with posting reliability or is it simply finger trouble?

[QUOTE=peterlemer;47124]I posted a reply on friday but it isn't here in the forum - are there issues with posting reliability or is it simply finger trouble?[/QUOTE]

I've never had any problems with the forums losing posts.