This may be too niche, but thought I’d ask it here…
I’ve been trying to implement Mark Forster’s productivity systems for sometime now, slowly building my own system…
I also have started to vibe with the term “redqueening” as described in this beeminder blog post: Redqueening, Inbox Zero, Backlogs, and Fluid Dynamics | Beeminder Blog
Mark Forster seems to have captured the redqueening concept in his “Do It Tomorrow” book in regards to maintaining a daily closed list of tasks that need to be completed. He calls this the daily task diary. It seems to align with the GTD method’s follow up strategy, of being able to capture and schedule tasks for follow up dates that make most sense to do the task… (ex: schedule birthday shopping for a friend to start 2 weeks before the birthday date)
Now, I’ve got a good system up and running for redqueening the day-to-day standalone/“one session” tasks I run into. Little things here and there that keep most major things in my life/business from falling through the cracks. The system involves 1. capturing new tasks as they come to my mind or present themselves to me throughout the day, 2. beeminding to have all these scheduled for tomorrow (or a later date if logical) by 10:30PM each night, and 3. beeminding to have them all completed by 5PM the next day, using boss as a service to hold me accountable, as well as taskratchet to add additional stakes to the tasks.
Yet, I’m running into confusion when it comes to projects. GTD recommends always having a “next action” for each project and scheduling review sessions to create + schedule a next action for each project. I initially thought this was something I could do each night: identify 1 next action for EACH active project on my projects list and add it to my redqueening tasks for the day.
After all, most of the projects have “bubbled up” from captured tasks designed for redqueening the next day, as I realize at some point they are multi-day projects, rather than tasks that can be completed in a day’s work.
However, when I started adding 1 next action for each active project to my “redqueening” list for the day, I think the list got too long and demanding, and I struggled to complete it on time, derailing on my 5PM deadline beeminder a few times. This is happening, even though the current active projects on my projects list are what I’d call “mini-projects”, they are mostly fairly small in scope and not things I have massive resistance towards doing (I intentionally am only using this system for mini-projects, specifically to stress test/build the system until it is proven ready for bigger/more significant projects). For context, I only have 6 of these mini-projects currently in my system, so that would be 6 next actions added to my scheduled redqueening tasks each day.
The current situation is, I’m now scared to schedule next actions from these projects into my system, as I’d rather not risk failing, and I like being able to get everything done with the redqueening day to day tasks. I also have a few task backlogs that I’m working through using whittle down beeminders (which has been working great !).
So, my question for anyone who made it this far is: What is an every day “project next-action redqueening” system I can use to stay up to date with “projects”, keep them reliably progressing, and reliably getting completed, without comprising my day-to-day redqueening system for standalone tasks ?
Any ideas ? And I know this might be confusing with the terms but I know a few members of this forum seem to be familiar with the intersection of mark forster, gtd, redqueening, and beeminder, so it’s the only place I can think of for help on this 