Is It Really A Project?

There is an obsession with allocating every task we receive to a project. Or if we don’t have an existing project to turn it into a project.

The reality is only some of the tasks you get are projects. Some tasks will be related to existing projects, but for the most part, many of these tasks can be completed within a few days. So, for example, if your sales director asked you to compile a sales report for your team over the last ten months, while it might take you five or six hours to assemble and there may be more than one step, is it really a project?

To complete this task, you need four or five hours to sit down and compile the report.

Breaking a task like this down into smaller tasks will not make completing the job any easier or faster. If anything, it will do the opposite.

A better approach to this is to look at your calendar and find a five-hour block of time or two consecutive days when you can allocate three hours each day to complete the task.

This problem of turning everything into a project and putting these projects into our task managers comes from a misreading of David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done (GTD).

GTD is all about creating lists around contexts, not projects. Contexts could be @computer, @phone, @home, @office etc. you would then organise your tasks…