Quote:
Originally Posted by Toadling
A trick I use to help me determine if an item should be a project or a single action is I ask myself if I'm likely to complete the entire task at one time or if I might do only part of it one day and come back to do the rest another day. For example, spraying down the car one day but coming back to soap it up, rinse it, and dry it another day doesn't make any sense. On the other hand, a "Get rid of old clothes" could easily be broken up over several days or weeks:
1) Sort through closet to determine which clothes to get rid of
2) Package up old clothes
3) Take old clothes to Salvation Army
Breaking this into a project makes perfect sense. You can complete it in several stages, and you'll always know where you left off when you come back to it, whether it be later the same day or a month from now.
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About all I can add is that sometimes it makes sense to do a project even for straightforward tasks just so that you can have a checklist to make sure everything gets done (in the right order, if important) when working in an environment full of interruptions and distractions. I use Curt Clifton's templates facility for handling repetitive tasks like this where having a bunch of them active at once might lead to sloppiness.
Curt's stuff can be found at
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~clifton/software.html