Quote Originally Posted by taxgeek
The reason I like to put the project description in the title of the next action is so that when boss walks into office and says "where's Jones's trust", I can quickly do a search and tell him the status of it, no matter which list it's on. I don't really keep project tracking materials, keep that kind of stuff ("sent to client on 11/26/02") in the note attached to the next action usually. Maybe I need to rethink this and put that info in the project list instead (as a note perhaps).
This is where I also run into trouble. I've managed to get to the point where I'm comfortable not directly linking NA's to their respective projects, however, I get frazzeled when my boss comes over to ask me the status of PROJECT X and I have to do a mad search through my NA's list.

I guess that this is something that I'll have to live with because I've tried something like what you've done, and it makes me nuts! What happens though is that I end up looking stupid (yes, I've found this to be a by-product of the GTD system; I don't mean that it has actually made me stupid - I mean that since now that everything is litteraly out of my head and not in the center of my focus my imediate recall isn't as good) because I can't remember a given project's status on the spot.

As far as missing projects, what I do to remedy this is whenever I process my inbox, I ask myself of each item I touch "what is the desired outcome for this".

If it's actionable, I try to determine if there will be more than one step involved. If there is, it goes on my projects list and I determine what the very next physical action is.

If there's only one step and it will take less than 2 minutes, I do it. If it will take longer, it goes on my NA list until I can find time to do it.

What I have observed as a result of this is that I tend to gravitate towards the things that I want to do and neglect the things that I don't (even though they might be very important). As a result, some things that need to get done don't. I haven't figured out a way to remedy this... I need to find a way (short of going back to the old A, B, C, I, II, II etc. method) to add urgency to these NA's.

Sorry for the long-winded post; I hope that you can find something useful out of all that rambling!!

-James