Please keep letting us know about your process and what you've been doing to keep up with it – fascinating stuff. Thanks!

I agree that there are some interesting parallels we should explore. Obviously, the point is NOT to overwhelm organizing/standardizing but do what makes sense for action items. Another idea, though probably CPU intensive, would be to provide a metric on what "stuff" is lying around in maps. If the "stuff" is not an action item and it is not in the correct "reference" map/topic (other ideas?) a penalty is assigned. Maybe even checking to make sure a hyperlink/attached file is in the sub-directory of the project map. I think this could help get the reference material filed properly. I've 2 approaches lately toward finding ref. material: Throw everything in My Documents & let Windows Desktop Search (or Goggle if you prefer), or neatly categorize everything into a strict taxonomy folder structure. Both have pros/cons but I think a hybrid approach would work best. While many projects are short-lived the material generated during that project tends to have value on new projects. And this reference material should be made instantly available.

I've tried to capture some of what you are referring to by having metrics on "focus" which encourage target dates for projects and keeping the number of projects managable. That tends to force things into projects rather than "areas of focus". I find quite a bit of my tasks are completed before they get out of the in-tray, which is fine with me. I set the in-tray's on my area map centrals to "projects", which perhaps is "cheating", but it has been working.

The naa tool works solely on the vanilla daily action dashboard so it is limited in what it can extract about topic location in the project structure.

I like the idea of checking for an excessive number of personal next actions in a given project. That usually is a sign of a need for sequencing. The report currently points you to the project and map in which you have the most actions but doesn't do any scoring based on that.

A total limit seems like a good idea but we'd need to decide what area and weighting to assign to it. That seems like a good metric to put in the "focus" category, perhaps at the expense of some of the 0.1 weighting on "number of projects".

Having 150+ "waiting for" may mean you are micromanaging that should be handled by a 2nd layer of management or that you are not focusing/sequencing your teams work sufficiently.

I'm finding just trying to put a target date on items helps to clarify the priority and "committed" status of items and is eliminating quite a few of them.

I think once we are up in the 9+ range, we need to find ways to get NAA to drive basic context list driven work. To be honest, with the exception of errands and "relationship" lists, I continue to work entirely from the NAA side of the dashboard.

Note that I made one recent tweak in adding a small penalty for having an excessive amount of "waiting for" tasks. I had accumulated >170 "waiting fors" at work and felt there needed to be some pressure to clean them up. What do you think is a reasonable "10.0" level of waiting items?

At home I think ~20 is probably realistic, but at work you might easily have 100+ active "waiting" items if you manage large groups. Perhaps the penalty should only be on items without explicit target dates?

I'll try to get back to some more posting. I actually moved all my AO stuff to "R:AO" to facilitate my 5.0->10.0 journey. Blog maps tend to gather a lot more "write this"/"read-this"/"someday/maybe" stuff than other areas of life.

JM