Hi Folke,
Thank you for the time you’ve spent analyzing thoroughly my post. I knew you’ll like it
I’ll work on myself to make less stupid and lame decisions in future, I promise
Sorry, I won’t comment all the stuff you’ve written here. I’ll just answer the first one, about the single next action.
I agree I have spoken not correctly or maybe not clearly enough that the project may have only one next action. Of course it may have many and this is exactly how it is implemented in GTDNext.
But lets look closer at the Chapter 3 of the book, the basics section. What it says is there may be a Next action in each Moving Part of the project.
What is the interpretation of the Moving part and how one can implement that in GTDNext?
For me the most logical way is through the sub-projects. And this is exactly how sub-projects work in GTDNext - each one has its own Next Action.
But of course, the real project’s logic may go beyond that limit of one Next action per project/sub-project, and that is why we have the Force Next option. It allows to mark any number of actions as Next. (I agree, and I guess I’ve told already about it, it sounds not well. But so far it is the most descriptive name we’ve came up with.)
And we are planning to move even further. (Planned to talk about it in the next post, but will describe it here in short)
Working with my real projects on GTDNext I noticed I often group some actions/projects into a single Project.
Sometimes it is not the project, actually, but just a container for separate Actions.
Sometimes it’s a huge project, like “GTDNext project” in my outline. And it is not the Project in the GTD sense, as it is virtually infinite and can not be assigned any measurable goals.
What it is - is a container for real Projects and Actions. And we do not have a way to treat these containers in current version of GTDNext.
That is why we are planning to add another node type, named Container (or you may suggest a better name).
The items in the container will behave the same way as if the were in the top of the Projects/Actions hierarchy (all actions are the Next actions, cheers!).
Of course the system evolves with time, and maybe someday we will rearrange the way the Next actions work, but so far it seems fine for us and many of our users, providing a good balance between convenience and flexibility.
Btw, If you or anyone have a concrete example of a project or workflow you can’t handle with the current GTDNext functionality, please provide it to us, so we can find the way to resolve it.
Good Luck,
Sergio