Everyone has their own idea about the most critical part of GTD and the GTD guys themselves will probably agree that it is the Weekly Review. Hard to argue with that – because the time each week when you get to make sure you are CLEAN, CURRENT and CREATIVE is a powerful time of getting on top of all your commitments.

But in my journey it was not the weekly review that took me beyond dabbling with GTD, but setting up a Project List. Somehow I managed to implement the whole GTD system and never actually got the distinction between Next Actions and Projects.  I had all my lists set up and knew about the Project list but did not see it for what it really is. Let me describe each of these lists in detail:

1. The Next Actions List. A Next Action is a specific task or action that I need to take on any commitment that comes my way. I’m meeting with someone and I promise to send them an article to read – what do I do with that commitment? If I don’t record it somewhere in an action management system that I can trust I find that my mind keeps reminding me all the time that I have to do it – and mostly I am reminded when I can’t do anything about it – like when I am having dinner or when I am out shopping. When I should be using my mind to think about things (ie. how I can improve something or create something new), and than of things – it will keep reminding me because it suspects that I am about to drop the ball. GTD helps out in this regard but getting us to keep a Next Actions list – a list of everything we need to do! And no, this is not the same as a To Do list that we have traditionally been told to keep – with  1-2-3 or A-B-C prioritisation system. The problem there is that we keep on looking through long lists of things – most of which we can’t do because we are not in the right CONTEXT to do it. And that is where GTD helps out: our Next Actions are groups in Contexts – like @Work or @Phone or @Errands, etc. I have described this more fully in my second GTD post – check that out for more details.

2. The Project List. Now, here is why in my experience the Project List was the big kicker and what actually helped me plug a huge hole in my system. My life is not just a series of unrelated actions. I lead a ministry, I lead a team, I have responsibilities at home, etc. I am actually a project manager – and there is no way that I could manage all my projects successfully if my sole focus was on the miriad of little actions that I need to take. Plus, when I am finished one next action and I cross it off my list, how do I know what is the next thing that needs to be done? That is where the Project list comes in! A project is any commitment that requires more than one next action to complete. Planning an event is not a next action but a project which consists of a series of interrelated next actions. And the project list enables us to define and track all the items that need to be done for the each project we are moving towards completion.

A good project list will ensure that you describe what the project looks like when it is completed (this is similar to Stephen Covey’s Begin With The End in Mind principle). Then it makes us think about the next couple of steps that will move the project towards completion. I don’t always set out to list every step towards completion – I define the next 2 or 3 steps and start working on those next actions (and I make sure EVERY Next Action starts with a Verb – ie. Call for a Quote). Then I transfer those next actions from my Project List – where the whole project will be tracked – to my Next Actions list and start completing them. When I do my weekly review (or in my case mid-weekly too) I go back to the Project List and define or find more items that need to be tacked and keep transferring them to my Next Actions list. When the project is completed I can delete it from my list and move on to the next project.

When I got my mind around this distinction between Next Actions and Projects I really found that GTD started to work for me! In fact, in a future blog I will describe who these two steps are actually the first of 6 steps or Horizon’s of focus – that is a critical part of understanding how the whole system works!