Porting over from MLO to Todoist has forced me to think about the distinction between a multi-step task and a project.

The distinction is forced upon us in Todoist because Projects and Tasks are two different entities in Todoist although each may have up to three levels of sub-<X> (either sub-project or sub-task).

On the one hand, this is a slap in the face to orthodox GTD.  David Allen is pretty clear that any multi-step process should be considered a project.

But being forced to partition my PIM into projects and sub-projects on the one hand and tasks and sub-tasks on the other got me thinking.  And thinking is the mother of More Refactoring Work On The PIM.

There’s a lot of things I do now in MLO that hardly merit the title of Project.  A mundane (and degenerate in the mathematical sense) example is reading a book.  This is a multi-step process for the most part, in that you read some every day until you’re finished.  But it’s really stretching things to call it a project.

Slightly less degenerate is getting together with a friend.  This is a multi-step process, but it doesn’t really involve much ingenuity to do it; it just requires tracking the steps so I know where I am in the process.

You know:

1. Propose some dates
2. Hear back from your friend
3. Close on one date
4. Book a venue
5. Go to the get-together

I include the last because it ends up as a calendar entry as opposed to a task, but it’s all part of the same PIM.

Again, this is a multi-step process, but it’s pretty stereotyped.  You could almost have a template for it.

Which is a good rubric for what’s a project and what’s a multi-step task.  If you can gen up a template for it, it’s a multi-step task.  If you can’t, then it’s a project.

So what are some projects?

Projects have several moving parts.  A project — for example, building traffic to my blog — may involve:

1. Measuring traffic, which is a multi-step task
2. Pinging influencers, where each influencer ping is a multi-step task
3. Buying traffic (I’m not there yet, but Facebook, for one, is always urging me to buy traffic for my page, and they have my best interests at heart, no?  :-))
4. Brainstorming how to get to “1000 True Fans”.
5. etc.

This kind of multi-step process naturally decomposes into a set of subsidiary multi-step processes until you get to the point where you’re basically dealing with multi-step tasks.

(Sorry to belabor this. I can’t help myself :-))

What happens as we travel up the tree?

The projects become more and more:

• General
• Long-term
• Goal-like

So the first four levels of the tree are essentially goals and projects.  The bottom four levels are essentially tasks and sub-tasks.

One might have a goal of Health whose subgoals are Control Weight, Strength training, Feel Better, etc.  Strength Training may go directly to a multi-step task of finding time to lift and lifting (since I already have a lifting routine in place).  But Feel Better is still pretty abstract, and its subs may be:

1. Control Fear
2. Master Pouting
3. Feel what you actually feel
4. etc.

These sub-projects are in turn complicated, and may consist of still further sub-projects or may go directly to a multi-step task.

Well, so the next step for figuring out the port from MLO to Todoist is mapping my multi-step things to either projects or tasks.

I thought at first I would do it automatically, but that began to seem like more elegance.  So I’m just going through my PIM and marking up multi-step things manually, some as projects, some as multi-part tasks.

It’s a good exercise in any case, since it forces me to look at a lot of projects I’ve become numb to in my daily and weekly grind.

And, in my book, no amount of effort spent on PIMCraft is too much.