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How do you plan YOUR week? Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Good morning everyone,
I'm sure this has been posted before, but I'm having a hard time finding anything.

One of the most important things of GTD for me is the weekly plan. I have been flip-flopping back and forth with two schools of thought and I wanted to get some feedback on what all of you are doing (either with feedback on my method(s) or the methods you use). I own OF for Mac, iPhone and iPad.

For both of these methods I use the "Available" view.

Method 1:
MOVE ALL ACTIVE PROJECTS INTO A "THIS WEEK" FOLDER
Basically, each week I would take a look at all my projects and move them into this folder if "I wanted to/they had to" get worked on this week.

PRO:
This is great in that it really lets me concentrate everything in one folder.

CON:
I like to keep my projects in alphabetical order, so they're easy to find, so it becomes a pain to move them out of the "This Week" folder and put them back in order of the general "Projects" folder.

Method 2:
GIVE ALL PROJECTS I NEED TO/WANT TO WORK ON AN 'AVAILABLE' STATUS; ALL OTHERS GET 'ON HOLD'

PRO:
Easy to Option-Click projects in bulk to make them Active/On Hold (I find it much faster to do this on the Mac rather than the planning mode of the iPad version).

CON:
Need to always remember to turn on 'available' to get an accurate picture.

Hopefully this makes sense to everyone.

What's your take?

Thanks in advance,
Marc
 
If you don't like shuffling the projects around, why not construct a "This Week" perspective by going down the sidebar, cmd-clicking the projects you want, focusing, then creating a perspective? The projects stay put, but you can easily restrict your view to just the current hot items. If you have a complicated folder structure that you want to maintain, refreshing the perspective is probably less work than carefully refiling all the projects at the end of the week.
 
That sounds great, Palmer. I'll give that a shot. Thanks!
 
I put all projects I plan or would like to be working on as active and all others on hold. Occasionally during the week I flip a project to on-hold or activate one but usually I only do that at my weekly review time.
 
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me hope that OF will someday have tags.

In the meantime I use two things to help focus on what I want to do during the week or on a particular day.

If you're not using tagging for anything else, an easy way to mark this week's active projects is to tag the projects in question.

Again if you're not using it already, duration can be "misused" to tag projects and tasks. Duration actually gives you the possibility of creating quite a large number of "tags". You could just use a single duration value, say "1m", to mark the projects you want to work on today. Or you could use all of the numbers from 1 to 9 for different kinds of tags. Or you can
use the 10's, 20', etc. for different purposes. With duration you have further filtering possibilities: under 5 minutes, under 10 minutes, etc.

You can filter based on flag state and/or duration. You can also create perspectives based on this filtering.

With some imagination you can really get a lot of different tagging possibilities to work nicely using duration, especially in combination with flagging. For example, you can categorize your projects as follows:

10m - Now - projects in the front of my head right now
20m - Soon - projects I want to get serious about next
30m - Later - projects that will definitely see their day sometime
40m - Maybe/Some day - ideas, possibilities, keep track of it so I don't lose it

During your weekly review you can confirm that 10m accurately reflects what's going on right now. You can shift things back to 20m if you like, or "activate" things from 20m to 10m. Every once in a while when 10m and 20m thin out, you can see if you are interested in promoting 30m or even 40m projects to a current status. This strategy decreases the size of the lists in each category, making it easier for me to have a good overview during weekly review. (I have way too many total projects so I really need a way to keep an overview.)

At the beginning of the day or week you can filter for 10m and then flag the subset of projects you want to sit down and work on today or this week.
 
I used your first method, a This Week folder, for the past couple of months. I found that it grew to the point of not being useful and wasn't quite what I wanted. I used to order my projects by priority, but that got annoying and didn't work sometimes as priorities shifted quickly.

I started the "treading water" strategy recently and find it much better. I no longer keep a "today TODO list" on paper next to me, and I don't bother with ordering by priority. You could easily alphabetize your projects using it:

http://kouroshdini.com/2009/04/23/ho...advanced-user/

I've implemented most of his system, slightly adapted, and have done more in the last 5 days than I did in the last 3 weeks. It's great.

My views/perspectives now look like this:

http://skitch.com/ijcd/d3p44/screen-...at-10.31.47-am

The key part is organizing by start date in the context view. This overloads the "start on" field to mean either "I've started it on this date", "I will start it on this date", "I need to start it on this date", or "I can't start it until this date". Whatever the meaning, it still works.

It also means that once I've started something, I tend to finish it as the list of days in the start view gets longer and longer and goads me into dealing with that. ;)
 
 


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