5: Projects and Tasks

Welcome back to this free intro course on Getting Things Done.

So far, we’ve gone over the following big ideas from the book:

• 1: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
• 2: Define What “Done” Looks Like
• 3: Mental Work Has 5 Distinct Phases
• 4: Get Everything Out of Your Head

Here’s what we’ll be looking at in our final lesson…

5. 
Projects + Tasks are Two Different Things:
Track Them Separately.

“the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are.” —David Allen, Getting Things Done

One of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to productivity is that they mesh together projects and tasks when they should be distinct and separate from one another.

Most of your goals can’t be accomplished all in one sitting – and when that’s the case, what you’re dealing with are projects — not tasks.

Project = anything that takes more than one step to complete.

Task = anything that can be done in a single step and usually in a single sitting.

Since projects consist of several tasks, it’s important to have a separate list of projects and to keep a list of tasks within each individual project.

For example, this lesson that you’re reading right now is a single task that falls under a bigger, multi-task project…

• This specific lesson was a task. 
• But all the previous lessons you’ve gone through in this Getting Things Done course are all tasks that are part of a larger project.

Now, if I wrote down “Write five-part GTD course” on my to-do list, I’d get really overwhelmed because the project would’ve been way too big for me to do in one sitting.

This is why it’s treated as a project (i.e. something that takes more than one task to accomplish).

So, the best way for me to get it done is to chunk it down into smaller tasks:

• Lesson 1,
• Lesson 2,
• Lesson 3,
• and so on.

See what I mean?

Well, that’s all I’ve got for yah in this free intro to Getting Things Done!

I hope you found it valuable.

If you’d like to take a deeper dive into GTD, try out my detailed audio + video course here.

Stay productive,
—Dean Bokhari