All right, let's do a question here from Gabriel. Gabriel asks, how do you manage projects versus detailed to-dos on your board system? And there's a useful elaboration here because this is an important, but subtle issue. So Gabriel says, I've been using a Trello type system to organize projects, which has been helpful to visualize their different statuses.

Then it helps me to choose priorities for a given quarter. However, as I've been catching up on your podcast, I've also recognized the value of a Trello type treatment of your to-dos to give clarity to them. Do you have separate boards for these two tasks with different magnitudes or how do you keep track of the status of any project or store them for later focus for a given quarter?

Yeah, it's a good question, Gabriel. So I use my Trello boards for tasks. I will occasionally have a column on a relevant Trello board for a project. So here is a project I'm working on. That's going to generate a lot of tasks. I will give it its own column so that the tasks relevant to that project are in that column.

So that's, that's somewhat common. I don't do this for every project though. Some projects, I know they're ongoing because I have them in my quarterly plan. And when I build my weekly plan, I see that and just figure out when and how am I going to make progress on that project during the current week.

So where this becomes relevant is there are certain projects that are not fruitfully divided into tasks. This is one of my points of minor respectful disagreement with David Allen. I think in David Allen system, everything goes down to cranking widgets. Everything goes down to a next action that you can just execute.

And he has this mind like water dream where you're just mindlessly executing these very clearly specified 60 second tasks. And in the end, you look up and say, huh, there's like a really nice New Yorker piece in a new book. The problem is, this is not actually how a lot of type of particularly demanding cognitive work happens.

You can't take a book and break it down into 60 second next actions. You can't take a hard article and break it down in the 60 second next actions. There's often a, a mini steps, let's say that's just ambiguously speaking, think really hard on this and see if you can make progress.

Like how do I crack this article? I don't know. I need to think about it a lot and read stuff and just try to figure it out. How do I get this chapter written? It's going to take me just hours and hours of writing. I mean, do I put it in a task?

I can't put write 10,000 words on a task because it can take five different sessions. Do I have like put session number one as a task? I guess, like break it down into different tasks for different writing sessions. I guess I could do that, but it doesn't seem congruent.

It seems like not a good fit. And so for this type of demanding cognitive work, I've realized it's better to just have in your quarterly plan, I'm working on a book and in this quarter, I want to finish two chapters. And you see that when you're building your weekly plan, you're looking at your week ahead and said, okay, I'm going to really go for it this week.

I'm going to really try to get a draft of this chapter done this week. So I'm going to go on my calendar right now, maybe and I'm going to take the first three hours of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I just cleared the decks, no meetings, go right to the writing shed and write.

And, and it's whatever, 10 hours, 15 hours worth of writing. Let's just see if that works. And if I can make progress on it, there's no real task intermediary here. It's me seeing, I have this hard project, knowing there's something hard to need to do looking at my week, reconfiguring my week.

So I can do that type of have time for that type of hard thing. So this is why I do not have a one-to-one correspondence between my projects and columns on my Trello board. Some very tasky oriented projects. Yes, absolutely. You know, if we're doing admissions for grad students, I'm the director of graduate studies.

Yeah. There's 15 things that have to happen. I need a place to keep track of all the information for each of these things. And I got to keep track of who's working on what, and I'm going to have a whole list of tasks. I'm also going to have another column that is waiting to hear back from, so I can keep track of, I'm waiting to hear back from the registrar's office about this and a whole column for the meetings I have every week with the graduate coordinator.

So I can keep track of here's the five things I need to talk about the next meeting. It's perfect for that. My task board has very little to do with my books. It has very little to do sometimes with working on articles as very little to do with trying to solve a math proof.

I go straight from my quarterly plan right to my weekly plan. And that influences my daily plan. No task board is involved. The final piece of your question, Gabriel's, how do you keep track of potential projects? I don't know that I really do that much. Like to me, that's not the hard thing.

It's usually pretty clear. You know, you're doing a quarterly plan. Like what's, what's the, what am I working on for the next three or four months? I don't really need a list of things that I could be working on. I mean, at this level, at the David Allen, 30,000 foot level, you know what you're all about.

You pretty much intuitively can figure out. I think I need to do a book proposal. I'm making progress on a book. I'm working on this academic new field or something like this. I don't need a list of potential projects. Not when I'm at the scale of what do I want to do this fall?

This is more about reflecting on my career in general, my vision for my career, where I am, what's been going well, what's been going bad. I'm not going to have any trouble saying, here's the big rocks I'm going to try to put into the schedule. So I don't keep track of list of projects.

One day, maybe projects at the scale of really big swing things. You're going to come up with good ideas. That's not the hard part. The hard part is when you actually have to start executing. .