I am curious: How do you people implement your Goals & "Horizons of Focus" in GTDNext?

question
#1

Hello

I am curious: How do you people implement goals in GTDNext?

Recap: David Allen talks about six “horizons of focus”:

Horizon 5: Life [a) Purpose + b) Principals]
Horizon 4: Long-term visions
Horizon 3: 1-2 year goals
Horizon 2: Areas of focus and accountability
Horizon 1: Current projects
Ground: Current actions

Personally I have gradually come to realise just how important it is to have these higher level of focus properly in order, as I seem to have a long history of not doing so! And by not doing, I have found that the GTD method winds up being a very efficient way of executing… all the wrong stuff!

In particular when your priorities keep changing - as in my experience they always do, GTD doesn’t seem to help!

And I have found myself become increasingly disenchanted with the GTD method because it doesn’t naturally seem to help us adapt to shifting priorities. It also seems complicated and time consuming.

[e.g. Personally I now think that writing down EVERYTHING that you might like to do is a huge mistake. It takes me days and days to write everything down. And then I end up with a list of stuff that has about 1000 tasks in it that I would like to do at some point. And then, because I am a very, very slow reader, I find it almost impossible to re-read & manage all that stuff… DISASTER!]

So my question is: How do you GTDNext users implement these different “Horizons of Focus”?

Personally, I love seeing the shapes of my hierarchies. This is partly because am I an extremely slow reader and an extremely ‘visual’ thinker, so seeing the shape of what I am up to really helps me.

[By the way, I am not 100% convinced by David Allen’s levels. OK, I am instantly at the limits of my knowledge but other people talk about things like:
“Vision” - Like a visual picture of where you want to get to
“Mission” - a general statement of HOW you will achieve your vision.
“Strategy” - a unique approach of how you will use your mission to achieve your Vision.
“Core Values” – What you think is important & how you will behave during the process.
“Goals” - broad milestones? (==“Objective Key Results”?)
“Objectives” - specific milestones ?
“Action Plans” – These are specific implementation plans of how you will achieve an objective.
Etc etc. ]

[And even more confusing but also critical it managing the combinations of Importance vs Urgency effectively. It’s a 2-dimensional problem and a simple “Priority” just doesn’t cut it. And worse, the priorities are often relative to each other rather than absolute. But no software that I have felt ever really seems to help with this… A simple Eisenhower Matrix is a good start but is too simplistic and binary and has no room for newance.]

Back to goals etc, I find myself wanting two completely different hierachies at one.

  1. Hierachy by topic
    e.g. Business ==> Client XXX ==> Project YYY ==> Sub-project ZZZ ==> Task

  2. Hiearchy by “Horizon of Focus”
    50K: Be the world’s best golf player.
    50K: Be a great role model for the sport
    50K: Provide a stable income for my family
    50K: Be the best dad I can
    40K: Reach #10 in golf
    40K: Have sponsors for equipment.
    30K: Have a stable handicap of X
    30K: Have been featured in one national and one international golf magazine.
    20K: Eat healthily.
    20K: Training a minimum of four hours daily Mon-Sat.
    10K: Set up a training schedule.
    10K: Find & hire a local trainer.
    Runway: Call XXX etc
    Runway: Call YYY etc
    Runway: Buy that new putter

And this is the problem: Although a the Real World tends to map quite nicely into a hierarchy by topic… David Allen’s “Horizons of Focus” do not. Instead they are general statements that tend to weave through each other!

As a result putting Horizons of Focus into a nice simple hierachy often doesn’t make much sense. Either way they are an utterly different thing from a simple “by topic” hierachy.

I suppose the answer would be to put one’s Horizons of Focus on a completely different system (probably on paper?!).

But what about specific milestones & goals? How can I put them into GTDNext?
AFAIK there is no “Goal” field in GTDNext. I guess in theory one could do all the higher level stuff with Tags… but who has time to add all that stuff?! …To every task?! And then my Context tags will get messed up with Horizons of Focus tags, no?

Either way, I would love to hear how you folks manage your Goals and higher Horizons of Focus.

J

#2

Hello!

Good topic :slight_smile:
And raises more topics along the way.

First, for me it is also quite inconvenient to work with Goals in GTDNext.
Creation of Goal hierarchies is fine. Turning them into everyday actions that can be followed is a pain.

As for my current implementation.
(I actually don’t follow strictly GTD methodology, neither I think any methodology can be a silver bullet. But comparing my own structure to the “six horizons of focus” I see something similar)

So, I have separate place in the outline for the top-level horizons

Horizon 5: Life [a) Purpose + b) Principals]
Horizon 4: Long-term visions

Those are under my personal section with top-level priorities and principles.

1-2 year goals go under another structure, that is under Yearly Planning folder.
It has sub-folders for the most important areas containing goals for the year for each.

Horizon 3: 1-2 year goals
Horizon 2: Areas of focus and accountability

This contains goals that should be accomplished during the year, SMART goals with deadlines.

Unfortunately, it is not comfortable for me in GTDNext to split those goals to everyday actions in the same structure. (Some of the goals assume repeating everyday actions, others have a set of fixed-date milestones).

Being honest, next-actions implementation of GTDNext doesn’t work well (for me at least). It gets quite flooded with a lot of (often irrelevant) actions and usually does not help you to choose the next action to work on, but rather makes you get lost in it. (Do you agree?)

Another way of tracking the actions is the Toady list. Must say it is also not implemented the best way to do what it was intended to.

So now I just have a folder called Daily tasks with sub-folders for each day and, after the review of my goals, I put there the actions to execute. Quite an uncomfortable approach.

What can be done about it, and what I am thinking of:

  • Change the way Next Actions work. I’m thinking of turning off the automatic next-action assignment for the projects. Because even sequential does not help much. Switching from automatic to manual or semi-automatic way of assigning Next Action can be a way.
  • Today list (Daily planner). It needs complete rework to turn into functional daily-planner.
  • Goal planner. A tool that you can use to create a yearly goals and split them to steps that will turn into the executable actions.
    As an example, lets see the yearly goal - run a marathon. You have a measurable target to run 40km at the end of period.
    You can then split the goal into the milestones, say reach 10km jogging by 1st of april, 20km by the 1st of july, etc.
    Then it can be split into smaller milestones and the daily jogging tasks.
    As a result you will be able to see all your goals in one place.
    You will have goals tasks appear in the Daily planner so you won’t miss them.
    You will have the statistics and execution progress of your goal.

It’s just an idea, so would be glad to hear the thoughts of the community about it.
Also welcome all the feedback on the Next Actions and the Daily planner changes. I will create separate topics for it on the forum a bit later.

Sergio, GTDNext

#3

I think a good way to do goals would be to have a separate outline that allows you to “pull in” a view of projects from different areas. So you would be able to see all your goals from all your areas in one spot (and filter them) and see the related projects for those goals. Asana, for example, allows a project or task to be in two different views at once. This is a great way feature that allows you to create a view of just your projects for a particular goal. Something like this would be very cool!

Making next actions display only manually would not work for me personally. With over a hundred projects, I need to trust that my system will show me the next action for all my active projects. What I do today is turn a project to someday if I don’t think I’ll work on it in the next few weeks or months. Then I review those projects each week during my weekly review to decide if they need to be active again. This limits the next actions down to a list that works for me.

Of course, adding an option to make a project completely manual might be a good compromise. Then allow customers to choose which next action system they like. Automatic or manual.

Good discussion, let’s continue! Wondering what others think as well!

#4

Thinking a bit more about this problem, I think I see an elegant solution.

Today we control how project actions reach the next action list by allowing them to be added sequentially or in parallel.

I think what you would like to see is a third option. The ability to add actions to the list “manually”.

I certainly wouldn’t want projects to default to “manual”, but I could see maybe wanting some of my projects to be manual. Maybe a global default could be set for people who want to choose the desired behavior for adding actions to the next action list.

Thoughts?

#5

Combined with a way to review projects that have no next action in play could be a great ‘weekly review’ helper…

1 Like
#6

I agree, that would be great!