Confused about how 'Projects' work

[stormer]

Hi everyone,

I am complete newcomer to GTD but am very impressed with the potential. However, I'm having some trouble getting my head round some of the workflows David talks about, in particular with regard to Projects. If I understand him correctly you file all actions that require more than 1 step under projects. Now what if I have a large project, point in case a website I'm working on. Do I go through this project and identify different areas that require work eg. designing the interface, dealing with various aspects of the processes? Do all of these items then get filed as sub-projects under the “website” project and would I then need to go through and determine the next action for all of these sub-projects and move those to the next action folder sorted by context?

Sorry if this is a bit vague, I've been plowing through it all trying to get started and have managed to confuse myself. Anyhow, any help would be really appreciated.

thanks.

[Julia]

You would put any next actions on your context lists that you could do right now (independent of one another). If all subprojects are dependent on one another, you may have one single NA for the entire project. If various areas can move along on their own, you might have one (or more) for each. They serve as a placeholder or bookmark to show where you left off on a project. The project plans can hold all of the other things that you will need to do on the project to the level of detail you deem appropriate for the complexity of the project. You can break a project up into subprojects or leave it all together... either way - it's mostly about what makes things the most useful and logical for you.