54. Listener questions #7: Big projects vs sub-projects and where to store support material

Transcript

Automatically transcribed and lightly edited. Timestamps omitted for readability.

Morten: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Getting Things Done podcast from GTD Nordic. I'm Morten Røvik and I'm here as always with my good friend and colleague Lars Schottskilde Hendriksen. Anjong Lars!

Lars: Hello Mr. Morten, happy to be back and looking forward to doing another episode with you. If you have not listened to the podcast before, our goal is to support you in learning GTD or becoming even better GTDers so you can experience the benefits of GTD. And we really hope that you find these episodes valuable regardless of how experienced you are with GTD. And as always, if you'd like a refresher or be introduced to the basics of GTD, we recommend you go back and listen to episodes 1 through 6 of this podcast.

Morten: Yes, today's episode is listener questions, and we have a couple of them, but maybe we should just cover something we just recently did, Lars. We have just returned from GTD summer camp in Denmark.

Lars: That is true.

Morten: Maybe you have not returned from Denmark because you are in Denmark, but I returned from Denmark, and it was really, uh, you know, the GTD enthusiasts of the Nordic region And we were people from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Estonia. Am I missing something?

Lars: And Germany.

Morten: And Germany.

Lars: The Norwegian living in Germany, Kenneth. So we had representation from a lot of different countries. So you were certainly not the only one who had to travel to get back home, travel across borders to get back home. But yeah, it was such an inspiring weekend. So much fun. Great to hang out with, with GCTeers. Always the nicest people. Great speeches in there, a lot of food for thought, and overall very positive feedback that we got on the evaluation. So that will not be the last time that we do that.

Morten: No, and if you are interested, I'm sure that there will be some information somewhere soon. If you are interested in, you know, we are not going to hinder you come if you're not from Nordic region. So if you want to come next year, which then the, the summer camp will actually be in the summer because of Corona, it was a bit postponed. And, uh, I'm sure there will be, um, some information soon regarding this. But do you have an idea of where people can go if they are interested, Lars?

Lars: We don't have a specific website or page on the website for this yet, but we'll be sure to mention this in the podcast in a future episode once we have something ready, for sure.

Morten: Yeah, and I'm sure if you want to have a little sneak peek and you want to try your Danish, you can become a member of the Danish GTD group on Facebook. What's the name of the group again?

Lars: GTD Masterminds Denmark. So Denmark, but with an A instead of the E initially. So that's where you'll find a lot of the Danish GTD community there hanging out, discussing tools and tips and tricks. All kinds of things. So yeah, feel free to join us there. But yeah, I don't know how well the, the translation feature on Facebook works now, but yeah, it's worth giving it a try.

Morten: It's not too bad. And if you're, you're hungry for participating, it's— it is an enthusiast's deep dive into GTD. And you know, we did contributions from the trainers who were there. I did something on Horizons of Focus that was well received. And it's just a way to hang out with people and enjoy, you know, nerdery. And for your information, this is low cost. It's not— and we, you know, everyone who goes pay for their own, you know, trip. The trainers go there on their own machine. We don't get paid when we do this. So maybe if you're interested, this might be for you.

Lars: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we hope you'll join us.

Morten: Yes. And with this little information out of the way, can you get us into the listener questions? Can you maybe read one? We can get started.

Lars: Happy to do that. So we picked out two questions. Again, thanks to those of you who send us the questions. We capture all of them. They go into our podcast planning document. So we have them all listed here and we pick a couple every now and then when we decide to do a listener questions episode. So this one we got from Bill, and Bill said he sent us a nice email. He said he started listening to the podcast after reading about it on the GTD Reddit forum, falling off the GTD wagon, and he's trying to get back on, especially because things have gotten much busier at work and he needs to just become more organized. And one aspect where he has been struggling lately is projects. So he you know, writes in his emails that he knows that they're defined as things that have more than one next action associated. But thinking about it from the other side, how, how about being too broad? And as many of you know, it is a very broad definition. So he gives a couple of examples of being a corporate controller at a large company, and there could be a project like that saying, you know, obtain financing from a new bank. And there are many many tasks, many next actions that go into that single project. And many of them could be done concurrently. So it might be difficult to decide on the fly because they all basically need to be moved along together. So maybe that means I really need to have many subprojects and tasks. And he gives a couple of examples on what that might look like. And then he says, how do you both handle projects like this that have many pieces that all need to be moving forward at the same time because they often involve various stakeholders that need to make progress together to meet a deadline and says that he could probably have 20 next actions he could be doing at any given time, all from his laptop or from the, from the office. And lastly, he says, I know I would need to prioritize the next action myself. So this is more of a question of the best way to organize and keep track of these actions. One big projects list with 20 next actions or broken into smaller sub-projects where I can scan the sub-projects and get them into smaller chunks. It might not make a big difference, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you for Bill Taggart from the United States.

Morten: Well, thank you, Bill, for your question. And, you know, there is many ways you can attack this, but if he— and let me just give you my two cents overview. This is that if you are working on a very broad project, you will make slow progress on a wide front. I talked about the combine harvester in some of the episodes before. If you spread your resources too thin, you will just tick off next actions and you will go around. For those of you who are on the video on YouTube now, you will see I tick things off on the same level and you will move things slowly towards completion. But if this is the— so that might not be the most efficient way to do things. Things because it will take a long time before you finish something. But so yes, and I would, if I, if this was me, I would have some sub-projects there for ensuring that I make progress on things that can happen in parallel. Often projects that we are working with are sequential, which means that Task A or next action A must be finished before B and C and D. So they are sequential. But when you have— and especially if they all happen in the same context, in the same context, the same arena for where you will make them, like, and then it will make sense to have them one place. But when you have then different sub-projects that can move forward in parallel who are not dependent on each other. So, sub-project A and sub-project B can move forward without, let's say, without interruption. They don't— maybe B must be finished before you start C, but that's not important as long as you have A and B running at the same time. So, my suggestion here would be to move in and out the different sub-projects for the big projects, in and out of focus using the, you know, you can make a category for them or a folder for those you are not moving forward. That's project on hold. So make a category for them. So, and my only reason for talking about this is that, you know, that if you are going too wide, you are going too broad, you're going too slow on each project, you will never have that, ah, I finished something. Patting your shoulder and say, hey, I'm finished. And I don't know, I think the most of us, when we are, most people that I know of are our own bosses. You know, you're responsible for what you need to do. And maybe you have a boss who are good at, you know, slapping your shoulder when you do something good. But most of us need to slap our own shoulders. So make sure that you get that so that you get a kind of the wins you need to get. So don't go too broad would be my perspective on this. What's your perspective, Lars?

Lars: Yeah, no, I really like the question because it's something that's good to talk about and reflect on in your own GTD practice. And I think, you know, many are a bit hesitant to create too many projects. And I might be saying that aloud because that might also apply to me. But it's just such a silly way to hide hide your own workload from yourself. That's at least one aspect of it. And then I, you know, the example that I often give, and you know, we see it in the seminars where people had one in the most recent seminar in about less than a month ago now, and you could clearly see that. So this is a project in GTD, and then he sat down and he was building his own system. And we had this workshop session, and I walked around and we sat down and had a look at his system, and he had written down KDE X4. That was his project, you know, and that's because that was a project in their organization. So that was, you know, his starting point. But often these projects are so much more complex, just like Bill says, that there are so many more moving parts in these. And like you said, there are many different reasons for why we want to have that full list of projects. So you can move forward on them concurrently, but also to make sure that you don't miss any. That's, you know, when you just have that one big project and you have maybe not even, not 20, but just 5 next actions, that could be an indicator that there are some subprojects in there. Not necessarily 5, but there are some things that they have separate finish lines for different parts of that bigger project. And we certainly want to be sure that you don't miss any of those because what happens is, ah yeah, I got that one done, checked it off, and then the phone rang. And then you forgot to capture the next action in that one. What's going to keep you going towards that finish line is if you have a project defined for it. So it really, you know, I'm, it's so nice to take these bigger projects. I had one other example from a seminar was because we actually had two participants who both had the same project overall, at least they needed to launch a new website. And one person was a website developer, had done it many times. So there was really literally just a project for that person, launch this new website. For another person who was sort of, you know, I was going to say multitasking, that's not the right, the right word, but one who had, let's say, project assistant who was involved in a lot of different projects, had a lot of small projects on her own list as well. And that project for her was not just to launch her website because there were so many moving parts that she was not comfortable and did not sort of know them off the of experience what needed to happen. So it was really, we need to get all the texts revisited and translated, we need to find new pictures for this, we need to solve the technical challenges. There were really a lot of smaller projects for her in that big project. So both their lives really had the same goal, but the way they got there and the corresponding GTD system was just very different. So the way you use this, and I thought this was also a good way now to, for the listeners now listening to, to just as part of maybe your next weekly review, or if you want to reflect later today to just run through that projects list and make sure that they actually encapsulate where you want to be and that you have all the moving parts captured.

Morten: Yeah, well, to— this is, you know, just remind people that the basic of Getting Things Done project and next action is that the project has a desired outcome. What you want to be true in the future here. And then you have Next Actions based that is born from these projects. So make sure that you are moving on the most important things and on that project. So, so we, we suggest also that you will only use one Next Action per project, per context, which means that if you need to take a phone call and send an email and they are not interdependent of each other, so they don't need to be sequential, they can be parallel, and they are on two different arenas, one is on the phone and one is on the, yeah, on your computer, then that's fine. That's not a problem. But the problem here is that if you have too many active projects with too many next actions on the same context, that leads to overwhelm because there is like 200 things I can pick from. So, and we don't like overwhelm. We actually, I hate it. I don't like that. You know, I want to have freedom. I want to have the feeling of mastery. I want to feel good about my work. And the only person who can do something about that is me and how I plan and look at things. And when you renegotiate something off a list, it's not forgotten and you still feel good about it, but it's just not active anymore, for instance. So I come back to my idea of when you use, if you have a, you know, the big project could be, let's try to make it a little tangible for people, maybe, I don't know, let's play with, you know, a scenario. So let's say that you are headed, you're tasked with moving your 200-people big office to a new location. So let's pretend that you already found the location, so what is left, and you've signed the contract, so what's left is refurbishing, furniture, infrastructure, and what you call onboarding, or, you know, getting people from migration from the old to the new office. So, and these are huge projects, you know, if you want to move 200 people, you really have to think. And maybe one of these projects are going to be, for instance, infrastructure refurbishing and infrastructure will be then in the same category because refurbishing means you have to paint walls and maybe infrastructure is about you need to have cords for, you have to have network cables and whatnot, make sure that you have enough electricity in the meeting rooms, making sure that this is the most functional part. Maybe you have to have infrastructure, maybe you must have like a CCTV system, maybe you need an alarm system. And all of this is tied into, you know, I know I'm overwhelming myself just thinking about this. That's why it's so important getting it out of your head. But if you think about it like this, there's a lot of moving parts and they are sometimes together and sometimes not. But the idea is that you can, think about furniture, and you can do actively something about the furniture in the office before you decide on how it's going to look, how it's going to feel, what's the paint color, and the infrastructure. But if you put all of these projects active at the same time, make sure you don't have any other project at the same time. Which is probably not going to happen because you do have some other project. That's why it's so important to make sure that when you make subprojects that you can move the subprojects out of your focus. So you don't have to work on this this week or next week, but maybe the week after. So, what, what, how would you attack that move office?

Lars: Yeah, I think, no, I completely agree with you. And maybe also worth adding when we talk about these more complex projects that that you may need also traditional project planning involved in this. It might be that there is an MS Project plan somewhere where you have.

Morten: All these moving parts and stuff.

Lars: Yeah, exactly. And then it would be great to maybe pick the— if you're involved in that project, maybe pick the deliverables off that list, define projects for them in your own GCD system, and then make sure that they move forward while you still have that big overview coming from the MS Project plan. So it could be that other tools are available for this to support you in this. And then, and you started to touch slightly on it, I just want to go back to one phrase that he also added in his email. In the above scenario, I probably had 20 next actions I could be doing at any one time and all from my laptop at home or the office. So how do you then choose from that list? And he sounds like he knows his CCD, but just to remind everyone that, you know, this requires a review. This requires the weekly review to make sure that you run through these, that you understand what needs to be moved on and maybe what needs to be put on hold or what can you then choose from when you sit down to actually do the work, the planned work that you've set aside for yourself.

Morten: So the whole idea here is that when you engage, which is the fifth step of the five steps of Getting Things Done, is that when you move on something, you should feel good about what you decided to do something. You should trust your choice. That what I'm choosing to do now is the most important thing. And that can be a daunting task, just choosing what to do. We do have some limiting criteria which helps you to choose this, but even then, if you have given yourself too many active both projects and next actions, just choosing can be, you know, taxing. And that's why I'm saying narrow your scope by using projects on hold or sub-projects on hold for making sure that you are not overwhelming yourself into choice, because choosing should be done by the limiting criteria. So maybe you will walk us through the limiting criteria.

Lars: Laurence. Yeah, certainly. So, so just to refresh everyone's memory or introduce it if you are new to GTD, so when you have your lists, when you have your lists of next actions in In theory, you could have them on one long list, but obviously as you capture everything that's going on in your work and life, that would be a rather long list. So we tend to split them into context, meaning where you are physically or what tools or people are available to you. So we'll have a computer list, phone calls list, agendas list for stuff I need to talk to Morten and my wife and other important people about, things like that. And that's the first of the limiting criteria. It's context. What can you actually do from that list? So sorting the next Next actions by those types of lists will help you make that decision.

Morten: Can you give a couple of examples of lists? Just like physical?

Lars: Yeah. So, like I said, so computer list or agenda lists or calls list or anything like that could be next actions list as a starting point. As listeners might know from previous episodes, there are many ways to customize those, but let's leave that out for now. Then the next limiting criteria is time available. So how much time do I actually have? You know, when, when do I need to leave, or when do I need to go to my next meeting, or some other time constraint that you might have that will help you sort through the list of what you can actually do? And lastly, the energy available, the resources. What do you actually have the energy to work with now? And as I mentioned, I had a webinar earlier this morning for a large company, and then we were were gathered there and talking about this. And especially this energy component, I think, is so, so interesting for people when they have the option to choose. Obviously, if you have 4 deadlines and they're all due at the end of the day, this is not the time to reflect on, on 57 next actions to figure out what you want to do. But when you have the choice, it's so interesting to take this into consideration. So you can be productive if you want to, based on that, that energy level. Oh, I think I lost you. So the question is, did I— You.

Morten: Did not lose me. I muted myself because I understand there is a— I have a computer working a little overtime, so it's a fan blowing. I don't know if you can hear that, but I'm just taking the mute option for making sure that doesn't hit our recording. No, yeah, I was going to say, Regarding to the, the when you are choosing something, and it might be a good idea that when you— I'm just saying that, and this is when you do use the limiting criteria— I found that it might be beneficial for you that you choose what to do. Let's say you look at the calendar, that's the first place you look in the morning. What's my hard landscape look today? And then if you find some, you know, weird time, as David Allen will call it, you know, the open spaces of time where you can choose what to do, and you decide, "Ah, I want to make something from my list there," it might be a good idea when you're fresh in the morning to just choose a couple of things or as many as you think you can fit into that. So that you put that on a, you know, in Microsoft To Do, it will be my day. And, you know, the soft focus so that when I have time, what do I do today? Then the choice is made for you unless something happened in between. Because choosing is really hard. It takes, it could be really hard. And that's why the limiting criteria are there to help you navigate that decision. So where am I? What do I have? What tools do I have? And then what time is available? And what's my energy level? And what gives me the highest payoff to choose right now? And then maybe that is a good choice to do in the morning, because in the afternoon, maybe you're spent, and you will end up doing something completely different. You know, Googling 5 things I didn't know about productivity or something like that. I don't know.

Lars: Yeah, no, and I recognize that. And I mentioned that as well in the webinar. These were very highly skilled professionals, 100 leaders and managers from many different countries. But I still was honest and said, I don't want too many things on my list. If I need to make a choice, we need to boil that list down and make it easier for me. And hopefully I'm able to take that into consideration when I try to get an idea of what I want to get done for today.

Morten: Should we try and move on to question number 2? I hope, Bill, you are satisfied with our Long answers here.

Lars: So hope that helped shed some light on it. The other one we got was from Australia. So it said, hi Morten, I've just got back to placing an order for some more. I'm guessing that was in relation to another talk. And he says, I have been practicing GTD for over 10 years now and a regular listener for their podcast. The episode on fitness goals was particularly useful as it gave me some great ideas for how to best use GTD to learn songs as a guitar player. Great to hear that. I suggest a topic for a future podcast. What is some of the best practices on managing support material through note-taking apps? He gives OneNote as an example versus separate documents such as Word, Excel, etc. Pros, cons, tips, etc. And he finishes off his emails by saying, being Friday afternoon in Australia, I'm just about to start my weekly review. Yay. All the best from Matt.

Morten: I think Matt, what he refers to in the beginning of his email is that he, if I'm not totally mistaken, he bought some more notepads for his Capture Wallet at capturewallet.com, which was today's little commercial. No. Yeah, where to start on this? We have just been nerding with people in Denmark and we know one of them are really into note-taking and note-making and, or go from note-taking to note-making and high, you know, very highly engaged into you know, the reference system part of things. And let's try and keep this a little simple because it's— it doesn't seem like Matt has a very complex system at the moment, so let's not get too bogged down into a lot of different software and such. But if I understand his questions correctly, he's asking about What's the pros and cons for using a file folder versus something like OneNote or Evernote?

Lars: I think it's actually even more simple than that. It really is whether we want to put everything into one system such as OneNote or whether we want to have separate documents such as, you know, Word documents for each of the meetings that you attended. I think that it may be even back to that. Okay. So maybe just to take a quick step back just to define this support material that he, he mentioned. So for those of you who haven't come across it before, support material is material that you need to either complete an action or complete a project or have as support material for you when you walk through this project. So coming back to Bill's question, you know, that big MS Project plan of all of his activities or the big project that he's involved in, or your example, Morten, with the big moving process, that big project plan might be support support material. I have some next actions to read some contracts for a new company that we're working with. We need to— I need to go through those. I have that next action in my system. The support material, the next action says read the first document from this client, and that exact document is in my support folder. So that's where I have that, just to define the support material.

Morten: So if we I'm going to look into them. You know, let's— I suggest we start with files and folders and documents, is that you can build a system with files and folders. That is not a problem, but you need to build a logical structure, and you have to be very adamant on folder naming and file naming. That's at least my my two cents on this. And the reason being is because if you use a reference system, it should be very easy to find whatever you put in there. And the big pro for this is that it's very portable, as long as you have it in files and folders. Well, it could be that if you use Word at Mac, maybe sometime in the future the file format will change and you have to, you know, port your your Word documents. Not that I think that's very likely because it's kind of like a universal standard become, but it is very easy to— it makes the system portable. It's very easy to move from your, you know, OneDrive to Google Drive or whatever you use, easy to take with you. The The, maybe the only con I can find as such is that it is not very easy to link things together. At least if you want to have the portability. If you go from a Mac, you can make aliases. I don't know how well they carry over to, you know, the Windows world. Where you make a virtual copy of a document in another folder. So if you have different folders for different projects and, you know, you have two documents that actually do tie together even though they're in different folders. It's very difficult to create that link between them. At least if you want to move at a later point and have that option. And as I see it also, the Evernote, OneNote, you know, everything bucket. I think the Evernote was the name. It says a tagline, the everything bucket. Hansa assists, you know, the— it's the big con there. It's, it's not very easy to get things out of Evernote. It's— you can export, you know, folders or books as they call them. I think they call them books. I don't remember. I'm just migrating away from Evernote myself. Not into OneNote, but into DevonThink. As a long-term trial. But when you put it into Devonthink, OneNote, Evernote, or that, it is easy to get things in there. And you can put photos, you can put documents, your own notes, you can put everything in there. And you can tag it, and you can make connections between different notes. You can create a very dynamic structure. But the problem is that you, it's stuck there. You're stuck into that system, that ecosystem. What would you say about this, Lars? Do you have any, do you agree or do you think I'm— I think.

Lars: You covered it all. Thanks everyone for coming. And I'm sorry, but that really is, that really is the case, you know, the pros for the file structure. It makes it easier to to just create it and dump it in there. You have that long list. It does require, like you said, some good standards for naming conventions so you can more easily find these kinds of things. From a practical perspective, I, for my support material, I'm using OneNote as well. The one that Matt mentions works really well for me. Again, with the flexibility that it has with adding files and linking and everything, and it's You know, it could be done in a Word document. There is no specific reason that I have that, but I know where to go. It's just, you know, a habit for me. I've been using it for many years now, and with the portability and synchronization across all of my different devices, both Mac and PC, just is a good choice for me. So I stick with OneNote, and I'm happy with it.

Morten: Yeah, and I'm sure we're going to have a lot of people emailing us about this. So let's nip it in the bud before it becomes that, because if you are using any of these legacy systems like OneNote, Evernote, or Devonthink, there are, you know, at least Evernote and OneNote could be linked to your corporate, you know, profile. So how do you get, if you put something in there, how do you get it out if there is of personal nature? Or let's say you change role into the same group of companies you're inside. You want to carry whatever you created from before and you don't want to lose it. And just the portability like this is also not very easy. So, but you know OneNote better than me, Loris. You've been using it more extensively than I ever have. So how would you, how would you go about migrating something from— Yeah, no.

Lars: It'S a good question, and I actually have very specific experience with that and the pains of what you've just described, because as you know, we transitioned in the Nordic from having our own separate account. So I had what Microsoft considers a personal account, even though it was for business, and then we moved into the business account instead. And it turns out that there is actually, as far as I could tell, and listeners, please tell me if I'm wrong, I could not find a way to get the tools to export properly from a personal account and into a business account. So, I've actually had to, I'm just in the process of cleaning up my old OneDrive account, and I'll have to keep them there because there is no nice and easy way to migrate them in as far as I could tell. There are OneNote importers, but then they only work for the personal one and not for the business one, and I've tried a lot of different things. So, please feel free to correct me out there if I'm wrong. We'll put in a note in a future of it. But yeah, you're absolutely right, that can be one of the.

Morten: Challenges. If you are going to go for a folder structure, I just want to give a, you know, kind of my two cents on how to do that. And what I would do is I would start with two that, you know, if you are doing this and you want to encapsulate everything in one, you know, in one folder structure, I would start with two folder structures. Two folders at the bottom level which I call SPARE, which is, you know, personal and professional. And then under personal and professional, I would suggest you might want to consider using your areas of focus and accountability. So for instance, everything that has to, you know, personal and has to do with economy, if that's your, your, your responsibility, then put it in the economy folder. Make projects for maybe for electricity, for, you know, apartments, I don't know, you decide what folders you need. But when you built that core structure, don't go overboard, don't make it too, you know, too complex to start with, because that's always a problem, could be a problem down the road. And then when you give names to files, and this is where things are getting interesting, is that you need to, or my suggestion is that you have to be very mindful of the future. And what do I mean with that is that you need to think about what do I need to think about in the future if I ever going to find this document again, how can I find it easily. So my suggestion is that you start with the year-month-day that you file this document and then What is this? Regarding what or who? From or who made this? So for instance, 2021-09-21, I receive contracts regarding coaching with Mr. X from Company Y. And if this is that, then, then I can search on the date, or I can search just on what happened in September 2021, and I will just make search for 2021-09. I will find all the documents I have in my folder structure with this, or I can search for the client name, or I can search for the company name, or I can search for the, the type of document which is the contract, coaching contract.

Lars: Makes it very— that is more for the reference material and less so for the support material, or do you also use the structure?

Morten: Yes, I do. It's same with support material, just for make sure that I can find it. And, well, it depends if there's a short project, it's not many different documents in there. I don't change the name, but for just for You know, because support material can become reference material after project is finished. So, so then you don't have to do the job.

Lars: Twice.

Morten: Yeah. And I use a snippet for that to help me create the name of the— with a snippet, I mean, there's a TextExpander snippet. For those of you who don't know what that is, that is a little utility. They have alternatives on the Windows side, but this is Mac only. Where I can then create a question for myself where I'm asked all the questions to create that file name. So I use that. It's called TextExpander One Word if you want to look into that on the Mac. Do you remember? There is a Windows version as well, isn't it?

Lars: I believe there is, yeah, but I don't know the more details about it.

Morten: But if you search for TextExpander for Windows, I'm sure you will find something. I think that was the search term I used before to find this information. But just for making sure that you are thinking about what, what is the, you know, what am I going to use this for. It could be that, could be just a date, email from Bill regarding X. But if you have, instead of having like a scan— that's called scan_xx45321.pdf. Give it a name that it deserves so you can find it after. You don't have to look at— especially if you have a lot of different documents in the same folder. If it's support material, still easy, should be easy for you to find. And you know, you can do Command+Space on the Mac, or I think it is just— I think you can just do the Windows key and then just start writing on a Windows machine to find your files and folders. And if you make this more or less as intuitive as it needs to be for you, so you can find things again, and flexible enough so you can move things around without things breaking, that's what I'm suggesting.

Lars: Does it make sense? Yeah, it does. I keep mine in OneNote, like I mentioned. I do separate my reference from my support material, so that I have a Actually, in our setup, we have a section for support material for my projects. One of my wife has one, and we have one for shared projects as well. So we have this as sections, and in that section, we have— I have my pages for each of the projects where I have some information that I consider to be a support material. So it could be, you know, notes for next time we were printing some new course materials I have in here. I have some songs I want to play with the boys on the piano. So that's also in here. I have some what I call in my own little GTD version here called ongoing support material. So for things that are really, it's really support material for areas of focus. So it's things like that with the newsletter. I want to keep a good nice overview of that when I know which topics to bring up next time. Pay-related stuff, days off, things like that. It's all captured in here as well on a separate page too. So wherever you keep it, I mean, as long as you keep it, as long as it's easy for you to get to across the different devices that you work from, really to whatever works for you.

Morten: Both Lars and I are incredibly lazy. I know because I've known this person for a long time. And what we do not want to spend a lot of time maintaining a structure that doesn't work. So we've been looking for, we are always looking for how can I make this a little easier for the future me? How can I find my stuff when I need to find my stuff? If you ever you know, found yourself not remembering the name of something, and then this something, and then how do I, how do I find this information again? And then just to create a structure for yourself that makes it easy for the future you to find things when you need it. That's the reference, you know, thinking. And then for your project support, it should be also easy to find, easy to. When you, when you need it for, for your project, I need this PDF to answer this email. Okay, how fast can you find that PDF? And use that as a standard for how you create your system. And, you know, we are just suggesting things there that we've found to work, and maybe you'll find them beneficial.

Lars: Some of you may also just have your support material in your task manager, in your list manager. So I, in some cases, that's the case for me as well, that there are some bills to pay. I don't want to log into the banking system all the time for each bill I get, so I'll just collect them all on a separate list and attach the PDF of the, the bill to be paid in my list manager. And as I, when I log in, I'll just go in there, open each one, pay them and check them off as I go. So it doesn't have to be necessarily.

Morten: As complex as we've spoken about now. No, no. And then just try and find a system for you that is so simple that you will use it, and so simple you will find things, and so complex as it needs to be for the two before to happen. Because it has to be— and remember that, be kind to the future. You build a structure and take the time to rename files and folders so that it makes sense to you. So when you need it, that's the biggest shift, I think, in my working My experience of, you know, finding stuff after is that I have slowed down. I have to slow down my mental processor and start thinking, how can I name this so I will find it after, instead of just filing it because I'm in a rush, I'm in a hurry, I'm going somewhere. Let's slow down for just 10, 15, 20 seconds and then give it a good name and put it where it belongs, and then you can relax and do whatever you want to do. But just take that time, that little extra time makes a huge difference when you want to look for that. I don't know if you agree with.

Lars: Me, Lars, in this. Well, I think that's probably one of the areas where we differ the most, as we've spoken about before, when it comes to organizing and things like that. Your structure is much more well-defined than mine. So I'm comfortable more searching than you are. So that's one of the areas where we differ. But The more I learn about, the more curious I become, especially also after the summer camp discussions that we recently had. So maybe someday, maybe someday I'll join you.

Morten: Yeah, well, I'm just, I'm not purporting that everyone should do what we just talked about. It's just suggestions, of course. This is, but, and that's why I'm saying that if you are, look for what could work for you, but be really lazy about it. And you know that Invest as much time, energy, and thinking into this as you think you will get payback from your system. But there is one universal thing that I will never stop saying, is that you need to make sure you give your files good names. I don't care if you're Mr. Guru Number One in productivity. If you don't do this, you will have problems finding things again. So, do you agree with me, Lars, in this?

Lars: Not necessarily, no. I won't invest much time in naming conventions, to be honest. The file search goes across the contents of the files. If I have to click 3 files to find the right one, that's okay for me. That is time saved from spending time on naming these things as opposed to.

Morten: Spending time afterwards when I search. Okay. So, if I asked you now.

Lars: That.

Morten: Receipt for, for, for that clicker you bought 2 years ago at El Giganten. Can you find that easily?

Lars: Yeah, it's in the accounting system.

Morten: So yeah. Yeah. But it's as a file? Okay. And how would you go about doing that?

Lars: You go into the finance system and find it.

Morten: Okay. Because what I would do is I would, I will do the search on the computer-wide search, and I will go for receipt, LG Content Clicker, and it will take me less than 2 seconds to find that.

Lars: And I think that we did the same example last time, and my question to you was, how often do you get people who walk in the door.

Morten: And ask you to find the receipts? Not maybe this, but I have just have people asking me for finding contracts. We made, you and I actually made years ago, and you know which one we talk about, when we established Producted on Mac. And so having a naming convention for that, that helped. I didn't have to think. I knew I would find that document without a lot of clicking. So I'm just saying, we are different. That's good. And now we will leave it to the listeners to choose which camp are you. Are you Lars.

Lars: Or are you Morten?

Morten: We should create a vote for this.

Lars: Yeah, a poll somewhere.

Morten: Yeah, yeah, yeah. At some point. Let's not. I don't want to know. This is okay. But I think this is the end of today's episode.

Lars: What do you think?

Morten: Yeah, I think so. We are singing for 7 minutes, which.

Lars: Is a little longer than we're Yeah, good questions. So thanks, Bill. Thanks, Matt. Thanks so much for your questions. For anyone else who might have any questions, be sure to send them to us at podcast@gtdnordic.dk. You have that email address in the show notes on any episode, whether it's questions about this or feedback about the podcast, wherever it might be. That's how you will reach both of our email inboxes. And we also always wrap up these episodes by reminding you to head on over to GTD Nordic to have a look around, find the local country websites for each of the franchisees in the Nordic region. And on those websites, you will find articles about GTD, links to the newsletters, groups on social media, and of course, all of the offerings with the speeches, coaching, and seminars, both physical and virtual. And if you're outside the Nordics, gettingthingsdone.com is a good place to start to find your local partners. And lastly, As always, we really hope that you find these episodes valuable. And if you do, we'd love to hear from you. If you share it with a colleague, that's great. If your podcast client supports ratings, a good rating is really helping us becoming more visible to people who might also benefit from GCD.

Morten: So thanks to those of you who've already done that. Well, thank you everybody for today's listening to us. We, we like that you listen to us. And we are, are, we are seeing an increase of subscribers. Thank you for everybody who's subscribing. Continue doing that. And I hope that you get value for what we are rambling here and that you, you learn GTD or personal productivity better. And until next time, stay safe and stay productive.

Lars: Take care, people. Bye-bye. Bye everyone.