The problem
GTD fan as I am, I usually put a strong brain effort at the planning stage of a project, so I can later enter ‘executive mode’, following my self-instructions in a Robocop-like manner. Working like that guarantees you several hours altogether ‘in the zone’, and you do something memorable with your life everyday.
Nevertheless, my weekly reviews were usually too slow and clunky, due to the lack of a useful notation for my project outlines. I use a hierarchic outliner, and simple text files for simple projects, but the problem was always the same: how to distinguish at a single glance the actions that can happen at the same time (you can research a good host company while at the same time you decide which sections will your website have) from those that can only happen once others have been accomplished (you cannot take tennis lessons before you’ve found and hired your teacher, and bought equipment). This is what David Allen’s methodology refers to as components and sequences (there are also priorities, but they are more of a ‘horizontal’ element, I think).
My solution
After trying a lot of things, here is the solution that I used. As far as I know, it is quite unique.
Once I am through with moving parts of the project and figuring out things, I number them:
- With numbers when they are sequences
- With letters when they are components
Here is a fictitious example:
“R&D” must be completed before joining Linkedin, so I append a “1″. Within “R&D”, nevertheless, there are two things I can do at the same time: reading the site’s instructions, and looking for other people experiences’ in the web. Both things can happen simultaneously (I don’t have to wait to end one to do the other), so I append a) and b) instead. This is the way the whole outline works.
Advantages: as it was intended, it gives you an idea of the sequences and components of the project at a single glance. During my weekly review, I usually collapse everything and then open only the first branch: starts with a number? Then that branch is everything I have to take care of. Starts with a letter? Then I’ll have to open the next branch when I’m through. It’s faster and more secure.
Drawbacks: a project plan is usually a “living document”, and sometimes, when things have to be rearranged, you are obliged to rearrange the numbering too, which is fuzzy. This classification should not be difficult to automate with some kind of script, so maybe I’ll do it once my learning curve reaches there. 
Final considerations
1.-As usual, it came as a surprise, while looking for stuff on the Internet, the absence of actual examples. You could find 150,000 available outliners to download, but not a single buddy telling what he did to organize his outlines. I think it has to do with the difference between information and knowledge, or, in other words, the car still seems much more important than the destination.
2.-Funny how this listing division (letters or numbers) is not intuitive in any word processor, outliner or editor I tried, so it is usually very hard, when possible, to combine they both. Programs usually offer you either “ordered lists”, including letters and numbers in the same pack, and “unordered lists”, with bullets, arrows, tiny fingers, helicopters and the like. I think this is one of those cases in which computers might use some more attention on human needs, instead of being so self-focused.
How do you cope with the components-sequences dilemma? Which is your outliner of choice?
Note: the outline shown here is uncompleted and simple, for the sake of the example, and many of its elements have not been developed into the operational level (for example, “photo” might require 1-take a photo of yourself 2-pass it to the computer 3-upload to the site 4-check dimensions, etc… )
Related posts:
The GTD First Aid Kit (Part 2)
The GTD First Aid Kit (and 4)
The GTD First Aid kit (Part 3)
Reach for the moon, but start with your (two) shoelaces
A car? Make it an elephant!
