Below the goals level are the areas of responsibility. For me they are the logical divisions under which projects happen. I group mine in ways that make sense to me but may not follow GTD perfectly. I have focus areas of health, house, each species of animal, each major hobby and so on.

Projects are things under that and then next actions move projects along.

My big someday maybe list is grouped by areas of focus with all the projects for that area underneath and then a lot of those have my next actions defined. Projects themselves may not be very complex, just long or dependent on other actions or projects.

A current example is a goal of making historically accurate garments for myself. A project under that is make a Moy gown, but projects under that one are things like weave the fabric (which has to start after I learn to weave on the new loom bought because it can do the type of fabric I want where my older loom could not) but I can’t weave until I spin the yarn and I can’t spin the yarn until I find the fleeces that match the archeological records. I’ve been checking wool for several years and it’s only this year that I finally am getting enough of the right type to be able to sell what I need too for my customers and still have some left over for me.

So it’s not a complicated pert or gantt chart type project just a long term one. My current next action is to find 15 pounds of wool that meets the specific requirements for that item. I’ve got 3 pounds located and every year I check the wool as I skirt fleeces to find more.

A similar project I am in the middle of took 6 years to weave the fabric. Now I’m getting the courage up to cut it and start sewing. :-) I figure I’ve got another year or 2 on that one as I decided that I need to make a test case of the item out of commercial fabric before I cut into my handmade stuff so I added a whole ‘nother project in front of it that I wasn’t originally planning on.

That happens a lot to me so I just document the original project on the someday maybe list and move the new one to active and go on. And that’s also why I review the whole list weekly, to be sure I’ve got everything and am keeping the perspective I need about why I am doing this particular project now. Also I can more easily see that if I do project A that I hadn’t thought of doing now it will teach me a skill I need or set me up for projects H, I and J which in turn will make it a lot easier to do project M and N. They may not be strictly dependent projects in the traditional project management sense but they are related and linked projects.

Your long-term projects are apparently just that — long-term projects, rather them Someday/Maybes. In GTD parlance, these would be 30,000-ft. or 40,000-ft. perspectives, spanning years rather than months. Assuming your project was to start a vineyard, you might have “Monitor climate change for conditions XYZ,” then migrate everything else to a 40,000-ft. list. I keep a separate, short list of these projects on lists with those elevations has headings, rather than on my weekly-reviewed project list. I review these long-term goals quarterly, or on an as-needed basis.

You’re working out the right level of detail necessary to get the project off your mind. Many projects can be unstuck by working out the very next action; some require a little more brainstorming and coordination, like a mind map or an outline; a few are complex enough to require rigorous advance planning, with heavyweight tools like PERT or Gantt charts. The degree of planning needs to scale with the complexity of the project, so it sounds like you’re on the right path.

Rather than crossing things off/deleting, I just read back through the journal and the seeds of ideas from time to time. Sometimes, full projects grow from these seeds, sometimes not, but I have them available to me, should I decide to return to them later.

Jen M.

Which plays into the fact that there are hardly any true maybe projects on my someday maybe list. They are pretty much all projects I am committed to doing or finishing or moving along but they are also ones that will take a long time or I haven’t got all the pieces yet.

Also a lot of projects are weather based so the right conditions may happen almost any time but also not happen for several years, hence the need to review them regularly.

And a further group of projects have next actions that will take months or years to complete and the next action on my todo list under that context is actually spend x amount of time doing y. I have one project that has been active and working for 11 years now. One single next action took 6 years to complete working on it at least monthly and most of the time weekly. Another I am working on now I’ve been working on the next action for it for 4 years so far and figure I’ve got a few more years to go before I’ll be done. The whole project is probably going to be a 20 year project before it’s done.

Part of why my someday maybe list is so huge is there are bunches of projects that can’t be started until some other project is done and also ones whose next actions will happen over the course of years or decades not days or weeks.