Mr. Rod Welch
rodwelch@pacbell.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
..
Subject:
Getting Things Done
Action Items Management
Dear Rod,
== Getting Things Done
.. Getting Things Done is the name of an approach to task management created by
David Allen www.davidco.com
http://www.davidco.com/..
The essence of this approach appears to be getting *all* of your commitments
into a database where they can be manipulated and accessed. This results in
being able to stop worrying about them, confident that they will all be
managed.
..
It also depends on selective visibility of projects so that you are not
always looking at everything. It recognizes that not all of the projects in
your life are active all the time, which many other systems do not do.
.. My CanDo list idea that presents only tasks that can be done immediately
because there are no required tasks before it would be a nice addition to
this.
..
GTD does insist that tasks get broken down into atomic actions that can be
completed. If a active task continues to get postponed, it gets examined for
the possibility that it really contains multiple steps, and is broke down if
needed. It can also be discarded if you decide that you simply have no
intention of doing it. This may be the most valuable piece of technology
that GTD has to contribute to SDS.
.. I don't yet see any easy way that SDS can provide this multiple visibility.
It should be possibly to establish Diary records as project records and use
a subject search to locate them all, but that is going to be a kludge
without a more sophisticated search (A but not B).
..
It may be possible to change status by changing the subjects. Suppose that
the status were used as the last part of the subject indicator? Then
changing status would be as simple as replacing it in the control field and
updating the record.
.. I need to speak with Rod about this as well as whether it is possible to
have SDS do a subject search for just a prefix of the subject or whether I
need to include the project and the item in the subjects (which could be
done).
..
Still, it would be nice to find all records for a project not marked Done.
..
At the moment, I am adding planning records as I think of other things that
I am forgetting. This is working so far, but I think that I will soon get a
list that is longer than convenient. When today's schedule exceeds a screen,
I will start having difficulty with it.
.. Thanks,