I’m very new to GTD and haven’t quite fully educated myself on the system (so apologies if this violates some tenets of basic GTD), but i’m wondering if there is a way to associate a task/project with multiple areas of interest?
This may be an indicator that i’m not defining my areas appropriately… right now it set up something like [“Work”, “Health”, “Fitness”, “Grooming”, “Education”, “Friends”, “Leisure”, “Entrepreneurship”, “Personal Growth”]. There are some obvious overlaps with a few of these.
Any feed back is more than appreciated. Maybe even pointing me to some resources to learn about how to better split these areas up.
Try looking at the areas as roles (responsibilities), i.e. as an imaginary job title, and give them names that sound like that. For example, don’t call it Education, call it either Teacher or Pupil (depending on what you mean). Then for each project decide which of all these “guys” you will hold responsible for getting it done.
David Allen talks about Areas of Responsibilities (also called Areas of Focus) as fairly small things, e.g. Gardener, Cleaner etc in your private sphere, maybe a dozen or two all in all. He then also mentions that you probably want them grouped for additional clarity, e.g. the “group of areas” that are private vs the group of areas that are work related.
I have three such “groups of areas” at the top level, and I use the hierarchy to group the projects accordingly, and also the area tags for quick filtering.
If you have other task characteristics, such as contextual requirements for being able to do the task, which can be overlapping, you can always use regular tags in any quantity.
Thanks a bunch for the reply! The bit about thinking of roles as imaginary job titles and then delegating tasks and projects to the right “person” really helped me. Definitely planning on reading the book.
I think what might really help the community grow and flourish (and easier to integrate into our daily lives, especially for newer users) would maybe be a sample area of people who post screenshots of their breakdown and how it works for them. People will obviously use it in different ways, but it would be great to see what some consider “effective” for them to inspire other people to emulate structures from others.
