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When you review your active project list, how do you make an asssessment of the status of a project? Let's say you did a few actions on it on Sunday, nbut nothing else all week and now it is Friday, how will you remember or readily find what you have already done? How long does it take you?
When you review your SDMB list, what questions do you ask yourself in regard to whether to activate the project?How long does that take you? Do you write down your thoughts at the time?
I just looked at my projects list in order to answer the question, and found out that just by looking at the project, I could recall what the status is, for most of the projects. There are only a few projects which required several things. I had already noted them all in the project notes, so that I could have checked each one of them. Right now I did a short review for five minutes, but during weekly review I may take about fifteen to twenty minutes for actions and projects together (but it varies a lot, if some projects require unusual thinking, some of which I feel should be done right then).
Your set of projects may have different statistics. Can you let us know approximately how many such projects you have, where you look at them and cannot recall the status, even when you look at all the notes? Those are the ones which perhaps require some extra thinking and note-taking for streamlining.
For SMDB, my questions are (*) Is this still relevant even as SMDB or should I trash it? (*) has it become relevant or essential now? (*) Even if not, can I see some value in undertaking it as a project now? (*) Is it morphed into something else and have I captured that or should I do it now? Roughly 20 to 30 minutes, but varies a lot. Sometimes I just skim over them, and sometimes I engage more actively with this part of the review. Well, sometimes it helps to have these questions in mind, but it's not constrained by these questions and these questions are not an algorithm. It is mostly just looking at it and intuitively deciding where it is and should be in my landscape.
Regards,
Abhay
This is something else where TaskPaper is helping me now. When I do my review (maybe that should read WHEN I do my review ... lol), I can see all the completed tasks, and notes I may have entered of things I need to do yet. That holistic view, as if on a sheet of paper really is proving useful.
Normally I remember all this the instant I read the project's name.
I journal* almost daily. I found this to sharpen my thinking and also speeding it up. After the "braindump" I process the notes - so, the SDMB list comes after the thoughts.
My projects list is divided by what I call 'Priorities'. These are basically a cross-over between 50k-items and 20k-areas. The criterion is not so much priority in the 50k sense, but more akin the 'how much time do I have for this type of work?' question. It's the life balance thing, but time-wise. For instance while physical fittness is very important on the 50k-perspective it does not take that much amount of time during the week, relatively. So this category ranks fairly low. I don't maintain strict "time management" but if the number of hours I can put into my programming hobby is low, I shouldn't have activated all the hundred projects I am sure I want to do but only the 2-3 I honestly can find the time to work on in the next 60 days or so. And if the higher prioritized categories are pretty full already, chances are none of the lower priority SDMBs make it to the active list. So the question is basically: do I have time for this too? Not wheter I want to do it at all, that is a matter of higher levels --> journaling.
* if that is a verb