Quote:
Originally Posted by snarke
Indeed. Perhaps because, for some of us, this idea is utterly useless.
I have more than seventy projects in OF at the moment. (Not tasks, *projects*.) I have, on occasion, added a project that was already there. In order to minimize this, projects cannot be thrown into some kind of gigantic junk drawer; they have to be sorted. I have, for example, 9 active projects and 6 projects on standby in my "Work" folder. "Work" also contains six subfolders, related to the various different kinds of work I do.
It is not possible to rearrange the projects by priority, since it is not possible to put some of the projects in my "Personal" folder above ones in "Work," but have others below.
[…]
When some mechanism for prioritizing my tasks and projects finally appears, am I going to spend all my time reprioritizing things? Of course not; how absurd. Instead, I'm going to be able to just look at the top of the list of "next tasks" in my "At my computer" context, instead of wasting time having to scan through all twenty-seven (currently) tasks showing up there, trying to decide which one is the one I should try to do next.
I can only hope Mr. Allen would be embarrassed by people who believe he has found the One True Way, and anybody who uses different tools for organizing their life must therefore be Wrong.
|
I understand you completely. I’m not trying to say that GTD is the right way and everything else is wrong. I’m also not trying to say that if you’re in the right context the most important thing to do will magically leap out at you. Maybe it does for some people, maybe it doesn’t for others; it doesn’t particularly for me. I’m not making a claim about GTD or David Allen. When it comes to OmniFocus though, my perception is that that the order that projects were put in was intended to make a difference; in particular, it was intended to convey priority. My perception is that people are not used to order mattering and so they miss this. I know that I could be wrong. I have no idea.
Anyway, I’m sure that I have fewer than 70 active projects and I find it a lot easier to not have to look at or ignore the tasks that I’m not going to reach because of their lack of priority. I personally do that by keeping my folders of projects in rough order of importance, and during weekly reviews look for any projects that are really important to me and move those to the top of the list. The benefit for me is that, just like you point out you would like to do, I only have to look at the top of the list to find the next thing to work on, not scan through a whole bunch of stuff. My personal view is that it is more practical to be able to have important stuff at the top of the list and therefore make it easy to work than to have a very well-organized folder structure that never has a project outside of its appropriate folder.