Properly maintaining a project list is a pillar of GTD but doing so has always been something where I have fallen short. Several weeks ago I concluded that what would be far more helpful than a list would be a Kanban-style board of “Active” projects where I can readily see the status of each project. So the comments here from @DrJJWMac about Kanban in Curio grabbed my attention.
But first, some definitions may be in order. David Allen always considered a project to be anything that took more than one discrete action to complete. I find that by that definition my project list becomes so unwieldy I tend to avoid working with it. So in order to keep the list to a manageable size, I handle the smaller projects in a task manager. I have no hard and fast rules here, but these “mini-projects” require more than one action but can generally be completed in one sitting or in 2 or 3 sessions over a week or two at the most. Most of the task managers mentioned in these forums allow sub-tasks and notes, and therefore links to resources, and are adequate for the job. For what it’s worth, I’ve used OmniFocus, Things, TickTock, and Noteplan and currently use Todoist.
The “Active” projects in my projects list are much larger in scope and require more time and resources to complete than the Mini-projects in my task manager. These are things I am either currently working on, are gestating, have been paused, or are “over the horizon”; with over-the-horizon loosely defined as anything I expect to engage with within the next two years and is capturing enough of my mental bandwidth that it is worth tracking and re-visiting from time to time. Anything further out in time, regardless of the scope and scale, will be recorded in a Someday/Maybe list in my task manager.
Unfortunately, I don’t yet have the Kanban-style project status board that I want. I do have Curio, which I use as a project workspace for especially large and complex projects, but for a variety of reasons I have chosen to patch together a system to track active projects in a table in Capacities, where I tag each project with its status. Capacities does not yet have board views, although that presumably is on their roadmap. And unfortunately, tags in capacities are used universally and one can not designate the sort order as one can in Notion tables. So I end up with tags that start with numbers so that they sort in the order I want, i.e. 01-Doing, 02-Paused, 03-Up Next, 04-Active, 05-On Hold, 07-Cancelled. And I have to be careful not to confuse them with the tags I use to track books: 01-reading, 02-Next Up, 03-To Read, etc.
It’s not an ideal solution, and hopefully Capacities will evolve to allow something much more elegant. But I’ve been a Capacities “Believer” for 16 months and it has become a central hub for capturing and tracking information as I go through the day and linking it to relevant objects. Should I ever need to pull the rip cord, it can be exported into folders of Markdown files and opened as a vault in Obsidian where it behaves just as it would had it been created in Obsidian. That is reassuring.
But fundamentally, it’s smaller projects in a task manager, large “Active” projects tracked in Capacities and worked on in either Capacities, Curio, or even Craft. And projects of any size and scope that are more than two years away on a Someday/Maybe list in Todoist. And I concur with @DrJJWMac that a Kanban-style board is the way to go.
