[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by rmathes

Both of you recommended using start dates instead of due dates to eliminate seeing these date dependent tasks as available when they really aren’t.

Minor quibble: not instead of, but in addition to

I’m going to try that. Right now I've used due, and I have a view where I group and sort by due, and the status filter is ‘due soon’. That’s worked well in terms of only showing me what I need to do today or what is past due but doesn’t show anything else that is available. I might decide to stick with the due approach (over start), but I'm going to play with it for a bit and see what I see.

I don't work from just one perspective. I'll look at the one that shows items due today and substantially work that down to empty before I do anything other than the daily routine stuff from my "tickler" perspective that just shows tasks that became available today. You can construct such a "tickler" perspective in context mode, grouping by start, available actions, closing the groups for actions you don't want to view, and saving it as a perspective with the restore expansion box checked.

Re using iCal for these tasks, that’s something on which I have a significant philosophical disagreement. I know there are those that think date dependent TASKS should go onto a calendar and I absolutely disagree.

David Allen among them :-)

I believe a calendar is for events, and a task management system is for tasks. Some of those tasks are date dependent, some aren’t, but tasks and events are fundamentally different things. One way I look at it, if something needs to happen not just on a certain date but also at a certain time, that’s probably an event. If I need to call Bill sometime Thursday and it doesn’t really matter when, that’s a task and it goes into OmniFocus. If I need to call Bill on Thursday at 2pm, that’s an event and it goes into my calendar. Works for me, ymmv.

It works for you, and that's what's important. I tend to put things that I need to do on a specific day (what DA calls "day-specific actions") in OmniFocus with a start date of the beginning of the day and a due date at the appropriate time, but more as a practical matter than a philosophical disagreement with the standard GTD line; I dislike iCal's data entry UI, and I always have OmniFocus open. I also have relatively few "call at 2pm" tasks vs. "get this done by 5pm".

Love the idea of using prime numbers for splitting up reviews of various projects. Only issue I see there is trying to keep track of which numbers I've used for which projects and maybe that takes on a complexity of its own. But I'll play with that and just randomly assign them and see what I see. If it’s something I want to review roughly weekly, maybe I alternate between 5/7/11 to spread it out.

To give credit where credit is due, the prime number bit is Curt Clifton's idea, though I've got a post somewhere that illustrates why it works so well, and how to smooth out the review workload in a bit more detail.

It's very flexible, and not worth agonizing over getting it exactly right, because you'll likely always have new projects showing up and old projects being completed or dropped. If a project doesn't seem to be making as much progress as you would like, change the review period to a smaller number. If a project is being pushed towards the back burner, or simply doesn't need to be reviewed as often, pick a bigger number. As long as they all get reviewed periodically, and you either do some work on them or ruthlessly cull the herd, everything should make progress.

I think one should still do the longer-term reviews. My view is that the weekly review helps drive execution of tasks, whereas the longer-term ones guide your direction, make sure you're meeting your goals, etc. DA's weekly review makes sense if you are doing GTD on paper, but with a computer to do some of the drudgery of keeping track of what you have and haven't reviewed yet this week, each project having a variable review cycle becomes practical, and can have great value. With a weekly review, you're only forced to confront the lack of progress once a week, but set that review period down to daily and do a daily review cycle and it's like those annoying questions from spouse or parent without the inconvenience :-)

Re lucas’ suggestion and explanation of project prioritization, that makes some sense and I might play with that. My gut reaction is that I'd be prioritizing some projects because they lend themselves to it, and not others which really don’t, so my mind wouldn’t fully trust that the resulting list order had genuine meaning. But I'm going to play with it and see what happens. Thanks for the clarification.

The whole list doesn't have to be ordered, just nudge something to the top if it needs a bit of emphasis. After that, you can choose by date added if you want to get some of the older tasks done, or use Curt Clifton's "Where to Focus" dashboard widget to pick the context with the most accumulated actions, or even your magic 8 ball or other executive decision-making tool.

And finally, the last point from whpalmer4 is a great one in that if a project just keeps hanging around for months with no progress, then something needs to change, either my commitment to it or the next actions I'm asking of myself.

It applies to stuff, too, though one shouldn't look to me as a shining example in that regard :-)