Creating an Archive of Completed Projects and Actions-Do you do this? How?

[AaronJ16]

My questions here is for Outlook implementation primarily. I am interested in how one might archive their completed projects for review. Does anyone do this? I do not remember DA ever mentioning that in his book, although I haven't reviewed it in a long time. This practice would be very useful for me, especially when performance reviews roll around. I would like to be able to go back and recite all of the projects I had brought to completion, and have a way of recalling the important obstacles that presented themselves along the way.

Any thoughts?

[Jamie Elis]

Maybe just a spread sheet? Or you could use colored-coded index cards where colors matched a kind of project (e.g., green for financial, pin for personal, blue for household, etc) and file by date started or ended? Might be useful for justifying your position, developing a job description, etc. Think about what you would use it for first. Probably a key element would be comments about how it went for you. I saw a log book in a museum in which an early surgeon had kept an contemporaneous list of of all the surgeries he had done and their outcome for his entire professional life. I thought it was very interesting, albeit grim With an electronic calendar that is reliable, upon completion of any given project you could enter "FINISHED______" and comment, such as, "Went smoothly, appreciated help of____." I would assume that one could use FINISHED as a search term and get a list of these entries by date.

[AaronJ16]

Jamie,

Thank you for your suggestions. I was thinking of something a little more simplistic and less structured and specifically applicable to outlook implementation. I may have come up with a good solution.

I just created a new category called "completed projects". Its now a simple matter of reassigning a completed project to the new category and clearing the old category. I suppose the missing piece is attaching the associated actions steps that were part of completing the project. I could copy and past into the project task. Not sure what the best way is for tying completed elements together.

Ideas?

[Ed Svoboda]

Dragging completed items around is one way to do it. Another option might be to simply filter your task list to completed items sorted by categories.

[ellobogrande]

Another thing you can do is create a new folder under "Tasks" and drag all of your completed Tasks from the primary folder into that folder. To assist with this you can set up a view of your Tasks folder where items are grouped by status.

Personally, I don't see the need to do something like this. I dump my completed tasks almost daily; it improves performance of Outlook and ActiveSync by keeping the data file small.

[Roger]

GTD itself is surprisingly coy about what happens after Doing. I'll occasionally put completed Next Actions into a Weekly Review folder if I don't want to throw them away for some reason.

The archiving of projects happens more-or-less automatically; about once a year I'll try to go through all my project folders and offload the completely-inactive ones into a cold-storage file cabinet.


Cheers,
Roger