Quote:
Originally Posted by Frosty Crunch
It's been a little while, but in my reading of Getting Things Done projects were treated almost as an afterthought. The emphasis was in filing away individual tasks in the daily tickler folders (the "43 folders"). These tasks could be next actions from projects, but he didn't put an excessive emphasis on projectizing everything.
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That's not quite right. A project, in GTD terms, is an open loop that cannot be done in one physical action. "Throw away the brown apple core" is an action, but "Clean up the kitchen" is a project. A list of projects, reviewed regularly, is an essential part of GTD. That's what makes the back-of-the-envelope project planning work: to get things done all you need to do is identify the next single action that will move your open loops toward closure.
The 43 tickler folders are actually a relatively minor aspect of GTD: they're a way of deferring action on an item by sending a message to "future you." But there are other ways of doing that. I seem to recall that Allen, in <i>Getting Things Done</i>, says that some of his clients don't actually use the 43 folders, though he finds them useful.