[reelsteve]

A bit of an artist (audio, video, web) - confirmed time management system junkie!

After the multi year walkabout thru getting things done, AnthonyRobbins Time of your life, 4 hour work week, Stephen Covey material, ET Cet...here's one observation related to your question.

At one point, I had my entire world completely broken down in OmniOutliner using major header items followed by their subsequent multi tiered 'sub projects' and action items. Using the collapsed view, I could see a zen like state of what I wanted the focus of my time (and life) to be about from an easy to consume vantage point displaying a balance that made great sense; +/-3 individually listed major projects I was working on, family and friends, athletic training, life maintenance (catch all for random daily repetitive stuff), Me (a section to cover my personal work and growth-including time management related activities). As I expanded each of the headers, revealing multiple tiers of sub projects related to the category, I made my way closer to single action items (as described by getting things done). I noticed a visceral effect on my body when toggling between the collapsed view and the fully expanded view. It was a 300mph race from tranquility to vapor lock/blood pressure spiking. open-close-open-close. One felt peaceful, one was overload and insanity. One was clean and neat-spanning one page, the other was 23+ pages of micro jibbersish.

IMHO, trying to consume a monster to do list is overwhelming. It seems as though breaking things down to their lowest action creates such a list if you have any level of dimension to your life/activities. Getting things done has some great qualities to it but it short changes the importance of "outcome based thinking". He plugs it a little bit but circumvents it by basically instructing you to react anytime an incoming event occurs and to go hyper micro on detailing action items. It ignores the principals of results based thinking, selective ignorance, and "information dieting". That said, I use 3 tools. The first is OmniOutliner. This covers the master overview. It includes my life's core focus items (as described above) and no more than 1-2 sub tiers which serve as the major projects related to the parent category. The sub projects generally span 1-3 months. Next up, I use OmniFocus to take over for building block details of the sub projects. OmniFocus's highest level of projects mirror OmniOutliner's lowest project tier (make sense?). Under each of these, I have one tier of projects which generally span 1-6 days to complete and an additional tier as necessary to chunk important sub aspects to the project. This is as far as I break it down and is generally a few steps above single action items. I stop here on the electronic front and let my brain do the final walking. David Allen would call this a recipe for "an amorphous blob of undoability" but I've found it to work well by incentivizing my brain with the question, "what do I have to do to EARN checking this box off?". I might then make a quick paper list of to do items or write them on my dry erase board, etc to organize the coming 4-6 hours. It keeps me out of the trap of 'majoring in the minors' by not logging minutia. Rather, it keeps me focused on reasonable next levels of elevation related to project completion. At the end of the day, I usually find that I have created more value out of my time. As well, I don't burn out my creative energy on the administrative duties of maintaining a micromanaged list of single action items. I do "groom" my apps nightly/weekly to make sure they stay tight and focused. One caveat....I do have a single action items list in OF to handle small ticket 'one offs' that need to get handled but are basically irrelevant to anything important. I generally apply contexts to these.

Hope this isn't too ADD for the thread. Different styles for different people!

Best,
Steve