[brianogilvie]

I don't think your question is specific to artists. I'm a historian and college professor, and the issue of how granular to be comes up time and again. For instance, one of my actions recently was "Update, print, and copy paper #1 assignment" for one of my courses. I could have broken that down into several distinct actions (review previous assignment, update due dates, revise prompts, review mechanics...). But I thought I could handle all that when confronted with the document; what was important for getting things done was having a prompt in the system.

I often use a change of context as a reason to add a distinct action. For my example above, if I was working on the revised paper assignment at home, but I had to print and copy it in the office, I might create two distinct actions. In the event I was working on it in the office, so I didn't see a need. In your example, you might make steps 1-5 a single action; steps 6 requires a scanner and a computer, so you might want to make that and some of the subsequent steps into a distinct action.

Basically, use enough granularity that you can efficiently break down your projects into actions that are both (a) small enough not to be daunting and (b) divided up into the places or resources needed to do them (i.e., contexts).

If you've never done a particular project before, you'll probably need a high degree of granularity. If it's something you have done often, you can get by with much less. It's not like programming a simple robot, where each task has to be specified in great detail.