Thanks to Contributors
Tivoli
via web
I just want to express thanks to the contributors who put in immense amounts of time to communicate thoughts, ideas, suggestions, solutions, how-tos, etc. etc. etc.
I started with nirvana very early on (never read the gtd book) went to other apps, fell off the wagon, went back to nirvana, repeat. Basecamp, thymer, central desktop, smartsheet, wrike (I use now this for collaborating), zendone, asana (5 minutes-fatal flaws in there) and quite a few others, actually many, have been tried for varying periods of time.
I'm no expert at gtd (have the book and have not read it) but I have devoured the forums here and just needed to stop and say thank you...proximo and folke come immediately to mind as particularly helpful but there are so many others who give. I think I "get" gtd finally. I feel it's about trusting yourself to make the right choices as to what really needs to be done, not necessarily when, but in which order and to be able to adjust one's responsibilities via a trusted system, easily and as necessary via reviews. Sound right?
I have a very long way to go to truly understand all of the nuances of nirvana...it's really quite complex, and will I ever understand sequential and parallel, when to use them and why? I'm not sure. I do know, based on the sheer number of tasks that I am responsible for as a small business owner and operator of 4 brands among other responsibilities, I need that "Later" section!
After all this time, and as a result of reading these forums frequently, I am finally getting the method and understanding nirvana's interpretation of the method. That's in principle....in practice, still lots of details to get. It's not about dates after all. That's big!!
Thanks for your contributions everyone!
2 Posted by Folke on 30 Jan, 2012 05:47 PM
Hi Tivoli,
It is nice to have a fellow seeker on this forum, and many thanks for your kind comment .-)
This is a very nice forum to be on for two reasons. One is the fact that Nirvana is so good that it feels worthwhile spending time on writing suggestions. Another is the fact that the people here have a lot in common. Even though differences of opinion may occur even here, at least we are all on the same "planet". As a comparison, just like you I spent a very short time on Asana. Not only is their system not useable for me, but their user group also has totally different interests and priorities. Here on Nirvana the consensus is reasonably clear: to streamline the individual user's use of GTD.
3 Posted by Proximo on 30 Jan, 2012 07:18 PM
Thanks for the kind comments Tivoli.
I agree with Folke (It's a trend) in that Nirvana is not only great because of the wonderful app itself, but the developers and users on the forums. Many ideas are shared here which makes it a great place to learn what others are doing to make GTD work. I also love the professionalism people show on these forums ( with me being the exception ) when expressing their ideas and thoughts.
I think you have a great understanding of what GTD is about but I do recommend you read the book since you already own it. :-)
I will forgive you for using the "Later" list. ha ha ha. :-)
Thanks again and I also want to echo your comments to the rest of the community here.
4 Posted by Folke on 31 Jan, 2012 10:40 AM
@Tivoli
You were saying:
"I have a very long way to go to truly understand all of the nuances of nirvana...it's really quite complex, and will I ever understand sequential and parallel, when to use them and why".
Let me try to explain parallel and sequential.
Most task management system do not have projects or tasks at different hierarchical levels at all. Everything is flat. A task is a task. That's it. But some apps have a two-level hierarchy implemented. In Toodledo these are called tasks and sub-tasks. In Nirvana they are called projects and tasks. In most apps there is no further functionality built in. As a user you hand-pick tasks to work on just as you would if they did not belong to a project. The Project thus serves mainly as a "container" or "tag" which gives you a bit of hierarchical overview in your list, and many users use this mechanism as an alternative to tagging, simply as a means to keep related or similar tasks together, whereas other may use it for actual projects. Anyway, this basic form of a project feature is what is referred to by the term Parallel in Nirvana. It might just as well have been called "Traditional" or "Standard" or "Manual", IMHO.
What Nirvana has done beyond this is very unique and powerful. By recognizing the fact that a GTD project (or any real project in the everyday sense) is actually a series of steps to reach a particular goal, and most of the tasks in the project are not actually actionable until previous tasks have been completed, Nirvana has implemented two things that go hand in hand - the Sequential project and the Unified Next List. It all works in conjunction in such a way that the sequential project as a whole takes up only one line in your Unified Next list, and can be dragged into any desired position (priority) among the other items there - among regular standalone tasks and other projects. Only the next task in turn from your sequential project is shown on that line. When that task is completed, the next task from that project is automatically shown on that same line, and the line keeps is priority position in the Next list. This is a very powerful way of keeping your Next list short and free from the vast number of non-actionable project tasks that can be done only later, and it makes it possible to to have a unified prioritization of all projects and standalone tasks.
Real projects, or GTD projects, are all inherently sequential to a very high degree. You have to do things in roughly some particular order. There may be a few things here and there that can be done concurrently, though, and some of the threads in the forum are about how such "partial concurrence" or "partial parallelism" can be implemented in Nirvana. If there is more than one task that can be done right now, you would probably want to see all of those in your Next list (to have them available to choose from) while still suppressing all the later tasks that cannot even be considered at this point. Now, obviously, some people want this functionality more than others.
Another line of discussion in the forum is how to implement additional hierarchical levels among projects and tasks. The term sub-project is normally used here. This is a feature wanted both by those who actually use the project feature for larger real projects and for those who creatively use it more as a classification ("tagging") structure.
Another related thing sometimes discussed is dependencies between projects - the fact that very often a project will come to a halt at some stage until another project has completed. I have suggested ways that this can be solved as an integral part of a general sub-project solution or as a separate solution.
I hope I did not make you even more confused ... :-)
5 Posted by Tivoli on 31 Jan, 2012 12:18 PM
Thank you both for your comments. I read through the last comment twice. Either I do not understand or I do not have a need for working in a sequential way. I do not seem to break down my tasks to the point where one task relies on another's completion. I do not see that concept at all in how I write tasks. They can all be done individually, when I choose to do them.
Maybe I'm more of a task writer who simply describes the end result of what the task looks like when it is finished rather than looking at its anatomy (anatomy=sequential?). For this reason, in each section (next, focus, etc.) I feel I need to see them all.
They will have different priorities, which is how dragging in place will keep things in the right order.
My projects are set to parallel and the focus view is set to unified list.
Do I sound clueless? What am I missing?
6 Posted by dafyren on 31 Jan, 2012 12:48 PM
Hi guys, just saw a mention of zendone here. I believe that we all want to stay updated on latest developments. If you haven't noticed, zendone just released a new version which significantly improves the whole experience and moves zendone closer to GTD.
I am keeping my Nirvana for now, but zendone is really stepping up their game.
7 Posted by Folke on 31 Jan, 2012 01:09 PM
@Tivoli
I don't think you are necessarily missing anything at all :-)
Maybe your situation and working style are like that. Simple and good :-)
As long as you do not have too many of these "undoable Next" actions in your Next list you will probably spontaneously remember to "ignore" them for the time being, and they are so few that they will not make your Next list too long and unwieldy. Then everything is fine. And if the number of such "undoables" should one day begin to grow for you, and you begin to get confused over them, then it is nice to know that Nirvana has the mechanism built in for you to deal with it.
For example, if you have 10 projects with 10 tasks in each, and each project must be done step by step, then you would be looking at a total of 100 tasks in the Standard (Parallel) mode vs. only 10 tasks in the Unified/Sequential mode.
8 Posted by Tivoli on 31 Jan, 2012 01:15 PM
I have gone back and forth and back and forth between zendone and nirvana. There is no search in zendone, which I find I use in nirvana. I also can't have all of my tasks live in "next". There are no other tags in zendone...I'd have to go back to evernote. And they only keep a few completed items right now. Nirvana's next, focus, later, scheduled, someday, sort of say it all in 5 words, plus inbox. It's all right there. I've had to do contexts in zendone of:
thinking/planning
short tasks
review
hanging around
soon/not asap
focus (meaning concentrate)
to get closer to my version of gtd which means these and the next/calendar views are in two different places on the page. Very cool, yes, but not working for me right now.
Folke, thanks. I do have a whole lot of tasks but only put what's really necessary into focus and next. I think that's the secret to keeping my sanity. Later is the bridge between next and someday which is very useful. I'm very discriminatory about what REALLY needs to be done between next and focus so there's little room for fuzziness :)
9 Posted by Proximo on 31 Jan, 2012 04:46 PM
@Tivoli
I think part of the confusion could be that you are talking about task and not projects. If you have a task and it can describe what needs to be done by itself with no additional steps, then you have a single task or Next Action.
If you have something that needs to be done, but requires multiple steps to reach completion, it's a Project. A Project will have each task needed to complete the goal and would be listed in sequential order.
Let's look at a simple example.
Project: Change the Oil on my car
1. Buy Oil
2. Change Oil
3. Dispose of used Oil.
In this super simple project. You see that we require 3 task to complete it. You can't change the oil before you buy it and you can't dispose of the oil before you change the current oil. This is sequential in it's simplest form.
You must first buy the Oil which would probably have @errand as the context. Once you accomplish this, you are ready to move the project forward by going to the next Sequential step which is "Change Oil". This next step will probably have @home as a context. Once that is done, you now need to "Dispose of Oil" which will probably have an @errand context associated with it.
Why do I need this to be a Project?
Because it takes more than one step to complete the goal. You could create this as a single Next Action, but here is the problem with that. You look at the single Next Action called "Change Oil in Car". What does that tell you? What does doing look like?
When you look at this single task, you may be thinking that you don't have the oil and need to buy it. So now your brain is thinking about an errand it needs to run but you are at home and don't feel like leaving the house. So you decide to do it a different day. You see, if you had broken this down into the actual steps needed, you would have known to buy the oil as an @errand when you were ready to leave from work to your house. By having this simple project as a single task, you did not realize that you needed to get oil until you go home and then it was not convenient for you to leave at that time to go get it.
You also have another benefit to making it a small project. What if you are going to run several errands. Now "Buy Oil" shows up as one of the errands you need to do and you buy it. This does not mean you are ready to change the oil that day, but now at least you are one step closer to completing the project.
When you are ready to change the oil, the Oil is sitting in the garage waiting for you to take action on the next step. Once you change the oil, you may not have the time to dispose of it at the moment, but it's no big deal. Now you have task 1 and 2 completed and you clearly can see that one more task is needed to complete the project. If this was one task, you would not be officially completed with it, but would probably mark it as complete, although the dirty oil is sitting in your garage.
So when looking at things from a Project point of view, sequential is nothing more than the proper order that the project task need to be completed in.
Sequential is not about single Next Actions but Projects.
Not sure if that made any sense but there you go.
P.S. Zendone has a LOOOONG way to go before it's usable for GTD. I personally think it's broken in it's current state because I can't create a task inside Zendone and add notes to the task. You must open Evernote to add the notes, which means Evernote is the actual app and Zendone is the updated container of that task. Very broken. I won't even mention the GTD list are missing and most of how GTD works is missing.
10 Posted by tivoli on 31 Jan, 2012 04:58 PM
This is great. I get it, but need to really wrap my head around it further to be open to new ways of working, which I think is a good thing to do. It's really very clear, but also very insightful about the anatomy of a project. Right now, as folke said, my projects are simply containers. Fascinating! No judgement on if that's good or bad, too early to say, but being a small business person yet with countless responsibilities, efficiency and productivity is very important to me. This is all so helpful. I feel like I'm at a crossroads.
Thank you guys!