Another Way of Organizing Tasks

Now that I have retired (still consulting for a few more years), I am finding that the Getting Things Done (GTD) categories I used for so long don’t fit as nicely as they did when I was in a separate office. [See my Task Management page for a discussion of GTD categories.]

Too many of the task-based categories “fuzz together” in my situation. Mobile workers no doubt sometimes find the same thing happening to them: many of the Context Categories (the “where at” categories) fuzz together, because you can do many of your @Office tasks from @Home and you can do some of your @Computer tasks on your mobile phone, and so on.

So I have shifted to categories based on my Roles (except that I do continue to use the Computer and Errands context-based categories). You can see these in the figure below:

You may have noticed that my new categories do not even use the Projects, Maybe, or Someday categories. What I have done with those is to label all tasks that were Projects with a “$.” That is, the name of a project now starts with a $ sign. For example, the project “Improve site traffic” became “$ Improve site traffic.” Similarly, for all Someday and Maybe items, the name of the tasks start with the letter Z, so they sort alphabetically to the bottom of the list in each category (when I view tasks by category).

One of the advantages to organizing categories this way is the ability to see if you are lopsided in managing your Roles, and you can therefore compensate. Of course one does not need to ensure that all roles have the same number of tasks and projects. But, you wouldn’t want an important role to not get its fair share of your time.

Update (2007 April 25): After working with the new set of categories for a while, I went back to the GTD-ish ones today. It can be hard to break old habits, and I have used the GTD-ish categories for a little over 5 years with great success. Turns out I have missed using them the past few weeks, and didn’t really realize it until today. I can make these categories work. It sure was instructive to try it a different way for a while. Turns out I was very lopsided in some of my roles: some had only one or two tasks, compared to 10 or 20 for other roles. So, it was a good excercise for me.

Other posts you may enjoy:

• Customize Your GTD Contexts
• Tag Tasks with GTD Contexts AND Covey Roles
• What Do You Want to Accomplish by Friday?
• Making a Big Change: A Case Study [How I Retired]
• Questions to Ask Yourself Periodically

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