I’ve spent countless hours of my young life figuring out which productivity systems worked best for me. I’ve gone through programs like Things, Evernote, the Omni stuff, and my current to-do list manager, Wunderlist. Yes, I understand the inherent irony behind spending most of my waking hours wading through feature bloat and trying to do side-by-side comparisons of Mac, PC, and phone apps and software.

And, as it turns out, there’s already a fantastic place online dedicated to giving us the rundown of what’s best, what works well, and what has the best-looking icons. What I finally ended up realizing, though, is that “productivity planning” and “task management,” at least as it has to do with how most us structure our time, all boils down to one thing: Projects. David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, seems to be the de facto standard method of organizing our thoughts into specific, actionable, and manageable tasks. And it works pretty well, I must admit.

The problem, though, is not with the system–it’s the approach we’re taking to using the system. Specifically, it’s the applications, methods, and “things” we put in the way of the simple concept behind task management.

Projects

Projects are the bread and butter for a system like GTD. Projects keep every task in a drawer, every item in a spreadsheet. We all have the overarching stuff going on in our lives that translate into Areas, like “Home,” “Work,” “Personal,” and “Finance,” etc. Projects, though, are the things inside each of those larger areas–the things that hold our day-to-day To-Dos and tasks and mini-projects.

When we start to grasp the concept of project management, things begin to come into focus. Instead of “getting our finances in order,” we mentally separate “saving for a car” and “preparing for retirement” into different and, for all intents and purposes, mutually exclusive buckets–or projects.

Our “saving for a car” project becomes filled with individual tasks–“research bank account savings rates,” and “call dad for advice,” etc., and our “preparing for retirement” project fills up with “open a Roth IRA,” and “sell that crappy ex-US index fund” (not that I’m opposed to ex-US index funds…).

When we look at one project per day, in this case, our overall goal of being financially fit becomes much easier to handle. We don’t need fancy checkboxes fed to us by the latest iPhone app, nor do we need any electronic system whatsoever. These systems become useful to us only after we’re able to conceptually grasp the difference between a large, long-term “goal” and a shorter-term, manageable-in-chunks “project.”

I’ve started naturally thinking in terms of “projects,” and while I swear by my Wunderlist syncing and Evernote notebooks, I only started using them after I had clear, concise areas with individual and independently-constructed projects within each.

Once this mindset becomes second-nature to us, the “system” we use for managing, cultivating, and structuring the mindset will become apparent. From there, it’s a matter of finding the features we need our system to have, and the deliverables we’d like for it to produce:

• Do we need it to have the ability to sync between multiple devices? Mac t0 PC and vice-versa?
• Do we need it to be able to update with a simple email reminder?
• Do we need it to be able to export a project’s items as a PDF?
• Do we need it to look pretty?