About goals, projects and tasks
Originally published at Xenocid's Lair. You can comment here or there.
For last two months I switched my GTD/tasks management from Remember the Milk to the OmniFocus and except for the ~$150 (oh, boy!) that I paid for the privilege to have it on my Mac, iPhone and iPad, I’m pretty happy about it. It’s very well done piece of software that suits my needs really well and while it already covers almost (more about it later) everything I want from tasks management software, I also can feel that there’s a lot of room for growth. However, there’s at least one area where, in my opinion, no one app does a good job. That’s connection between the goals, projects and tasks. Let me explain.
Almost every tasks management app maintains a relationship between projects and tasks, where tasks are small steps within each project. Some apps (but not the OmniFocus, as far as I can tell) support nested projects (or sub-projects), but quite often there’s actually a softer dependency between the goal (usually the long-term one) and projects and tasks that help you to fulfill this goal. Let me illustrate it.
For example, I have a goal of reducing my weight to 175 lbs (I’m currently 182 lbs). If I just put this goal as a project, then I probably have to put single, repetitive tasks like “Do the morning weight-ins” or “Count my calories intake” or “Do the morning exercises” there.
However there are three problems with that.
First problem is that many of those actions make more sense as a part of other projects. For example, I’m currently going through a “Hundred pushups” program, so I have a separate project for that, where I track my progress, however those push-ups actually moving me towards my goal of having a 175 lbs weight as well, so I should be able to see them as a part of the “Lose weight to 175 lbs” project, right? Unfortunately, I can’t (or, at least, don’t know how to) do it in OmniFocus.
Second problem is that putting those single repetitive tasks like “Count my calories intake” is not very rewarding in terms of seeing the progress, I should probably do it daily for like a month or two in order to see the difference and usually if something is not rewarding and you can’t really see the progress relatively fast then you won’t do it at all (see Dave Ramsey’s ‘Debt Snowball’ for the explanation of the same principle).
And the third problem is that for some goals/projects there’s no immediate tasks at all, since they are all achieved through the effects of other projects. I will achieve my target weight probably as the result of several other projects like ‘Do the morning exercises daily’, ‘Complete a 100 pushups program‘ or ‘Complete Couch to 5K program‘. Or another example, I want to accumulate ~$100K for the downpayment for my own house, but there’s no point of having any single tasks in that project/goal, it’s all achieved through regular saving, doing extra projects that generate extra income as the result and probably through several projects like selling some of my real estate back in Russia (I moved from Russia to US few years ago and still have some assets in Russia).
So far, the only viable solution that I can think of is to put those dependencies into the project notes, so you can understand which other projects are helping you to complete this one and also put few milestones as single tasks, so ‘Save a $100K for the house downpayment’ project will have tasks like:
- Save $10K
- Save $25K
- Save $50K
- Save $75K
That will probably work, but it makes such long-term projects a little bit artificial and they just tend to stay in your projects list as a reminder of the bigger goal, but they aren’t part of your daily activity and most of the time they aren’t even part of the weekly review.
What would work best, if instead of the two-level hierarchy (tasks and projects) we would introduce three-level hierarchy (tasks, projects and goals) and also create the concept of “paths”. Let me visualize it.
It would be really cool to create a goal (like “Lose weight to 175 lbs”) and then setup a “path” for this goal, where I can drag different projects and maybe even single tasks (like “Buy Withings“, for example), which contribute to this goal achievement. It’s important that this relationship should not be exclusive. For example, the project “Complete 100 pushups” can be a part of several goals, not just “Lose weight to 175 lbs”, but also “Significantly increase muscular strength and endurance” and “Prepare for CrossFit training” and “Become a proficient rock-climber”.
Also relationship between goals and tasks and projects maybe relatively soft in terms of completion conditioning. It’s likely that if I complete all those projects that I would achieve my target weight, but it’s not guaranteed, so the goal completion should be manual and I should be able to add tasks and projects into a goal’s path at any time.
Also goals should be nested, so I can put goals into another goal’s paths. Since there are lots of relationships between the goals like:
Another important feature that is missing from all task-managing apps that I’ve seen is an ability to represent a project (or a goal) not as a list of different tasks, but rather as a habit-forming calendar of same tasks.
If you want to clear your e-mail inbox to zero every day (as GTD recommends), it’s much better to have this project represented by a calendar, rather than to have a repeating daily task to zero the inbox, since it both gives you a perspective and an additional motivation to not breaking the chain.
Now, I’d really like to know if something like that is possible in OmniFocus (or some other tasks management app). I really hope that it’s either someone will show me such app or developers of Omnifocus will decide to implement such feature (hey, this is why we have “The Law of Attraction”, right?!) or one day I will have enough motivation to write my own productivity app that will not only give me all the features I want, but will also contribute to all my goals like:
- Save enough money for the house downpayment
- Become independently wealthy
- Achieve $1M net worth
and other wonderful goals I have in my list.