Jessica Abel uses the phrase “Operating System” to describe the tools you use to review your projects, reflect on your progress and process, and plan your next step.

The “operating system” I use consists of

A journal where I monitor my work and record process reflections

Project and Next Action Lists I make to review projects and identify steps

A weekly calendar to review my upcoming week and schedule work

A regular “review/reflect/plan” appointment to set your goals and track your progress

The last is what we’ll work on today.

Review

Recall your goals.

Review your “store”.

Scan your calendar.

Update lists and calendar.

Reflect

Reflect in writing on what you’ve learned.

Identify behaviors and strategies that facilitate work.

Identify priorities

Plan

Between today and December 11, what can you do?

To get started, I’d like to do a simple exercise so that you can put the goals you have for the week in the context of the product your have in mind.

Free Writing

Take out a sheet of paper. This will give me a chance to introduce you to a very powerful practice, one that’s very helpful and goes by many names, but which I’ll refer to as “free writing”. You’ll find guidelines for it in this document at this link. More resources for it here, including  articles on its value can be found at bit.ly/writebu.

You’ll write for ten minutes without stopping exploring the following: how your thinking about the project process and your ideas have evolved over time. Use the generative sentence “I use to think… but now I think…” to get you started. To get started, you may write versions of the sentence and when you get stuck, you might return to it and rewrite it to clarify or extend your thinking. Most importantly, keep your hand moving. This is “stream of consciousness” writing, so the goal is to produce text, not pretty sentences or thinking for an audience. Reflect, ask questions aloud, talk to yourself, but be concrete and particular as you explore your thinking.

Chart

Take a sheet of paper, turn it the long way– landscape, as per a printer- and fold it into thirds so that you have two rows.

Label the third row “Product”. Take a few minutes and describe the product as you envision it currently. Be as concrete and detailed as you can be, even if it means using your imagination to describe what you haven’t quite pinned down yet. You might consider the following:

• Describe the problem your work addresses or will solve
• Describe the form it will take, such as the number of chapters or sections
• Describe the method involved and the data you’ll be using
• Describe your stance and point of view
• Describe who you intend its readership to be

Label the first row, “Today”. Describe where you are currently with respect to that final product. You might consider some of the following:

• What have I written? Don’t be shy about including notes, journals, drafts, seminar papers, proposals for conferences, conference presentations– use any documents you think will contribute to the work you intend to do.
• What have I read? What data have I collected? Academic writing, especially dissertation writing, but also journal articles and other professional writing, situates itself in a body of current work. What is the status of your research in the respect?
• Where am I in the process? Consider the process with respect to you discipline and your department’s requirements, of course, but also with respect to the work as it is your own. That is, this is your project, you are the creator of something new: what is your current thinking? What problems have you solved or identified?
• What is the current status of your thinking? Where do you currently stand on the issues or problems you’ve identified?

There are processes involved and part of what you’ll do is learn to manage them– you need to write routinely, you need to learn to generate text freely. As the artist and author Jessica Abel observes, processes happen again and again over time.

Projects, however, have a beginning, middle and end.

You need to have a clear picture of your destination and, most days, she points out, forget about it: you need to concentrate on the tasks, each day, each week, that moves you closer to your destination.

So while you intend to produce a dissertation, over the next twelve weeks, you’ll be completing a draft of chapter one.

Our goals for today– and for you to think about over the next week are

• to create as a clear picture of the destination, the final product, as you see it today
• to define the many smaller projects that feed the overarching project (the production of the product)
• to decide among those projects which are your priorities for the next twelve weeks
• to break those smaller projects down into next actions you can choose among each week so you can monitor your progress and cross of the list

To help us identify the smaller projects that will be your priority for the next twelve weeks, I want you to generate a list of questions to answer about the project.

To Do:

Ask yourself,

• What questions do I need to answer to complete the project?

Every discipline has its own punch list– a list of things that are routine concerns, as well as novel concerns that pertain to your project. Here’s a list of topics that might help you generate questions.

• Rhetoric of the document you need to create– what do you know about he genre, structure, and style,
• Your research
• Your research process
• Your research topic
• The problem you are trying to frame
• The arguments you are trying to make
• The institutional process
• Your committee
• The development of your ideas
• Your own writing and research process
• A specific product your working on– a chapter, article or section

What questions do I need to answer about the process itself, with respect to the institution, the department, or, if it’s pertinent to the project, publication?

What questions do I need to answer about the form of the final product? Consider this from two angles– your goals for it as your creation, and genre or departmental requirements (for example, the form of other dissertations or the style used in publication)?

What are the next steps in my research? This may include reading, data collection, data coding and collation and so on.

What questions are open in your thinking? What problems do you have to solve? While you may be certain of the main claim of your piece, you may also have questions and “open loops” that must be addressed. What are they?

Rely on the standard, Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How to help you.

For example, for a project I’m working on

• What are the current standard diagnostic criteria for ADHD?
• What is the typical length of a book of this kind?
• How much “expert” knowledge needs to be included in a general nonfiction book?
• What are some models I can use to determine page length?
• Have any studies been done in the last three years that look directly at writing difficulties and ADHD?

If you get stuck, ask questions of your questions. What are the current standard diagnostic criteria for ADHD? becomes

• Who determines the standard criteria?
• Are their any generally accepted disputes regarding the standard criteria?

We know that your big project will not be finished in a week or a month.

Today is to help you identify the smaller projects that you must manage and complete so that you can move along the path of your project to your goal, and the actions you’ll take each week to complete those projects.

Decide on three to five priorities and among those three to five, the number one priority.

The idea of a Project List comes from David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done”. The Project List is part of a two-step process. Once you compile a Project List, you use it to make a “Next Action” list for each Project on your Project List.

Allen defines “projects” in the following way:

Projects are any and all those things that need to get done within the next few weeks or months that require more than one action step to complete.                   

Allen writes that “A PROJECT LIST is a master inventory of your Projects” while a “next action,” is “the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.”

Allen believes that a project list and its partner in the process, “Next Action” lists are more helpful, rather than a “to do” list or a list of next actions you generate as the situation calls for it.

One of the most common questions we get, as people begin to implement the GTD method, is “Why do I need to have a Projects list?” In other words, people want to know if they can get away with simply creating and looking at lists of Next Actions.

A current, clear, and complete projects list is the key tool for managing the horizon of our commitments that, in my experience, has the greatest improvement opportunity for anyone leading a life of any significant complexity.

Projects range all over the map, and most people have between thirty and a hundred such commitments, at any point in time. Each one of these agreements with ourselves needs some sort of “stake in the ground” anchored in such a way that we revisit it frequently enough to trust nothing is being missed or falling through the cracks about it, and that forward motion is appropriately happening. If you only tracked Next Actions, then once you finished the action, without a trusted placeholder for the final outcome, you would have to keep track of that desired result in your head.
   

                                   David Allen, Getting Things Done

Categorize you Questions to Answer

First, take a look at your Questions to Answer. See if they suggest any categories to you. Some may related to your process: you must read a certain number of articles a week. Others may have a concrete outcome: an introduction must be written.

See how those questions gather together into groups. Name the groups. Define them. I take this list.

• What are the current standard diagnostic criteria for ADHD?
• What is the typical length of a book of this kind?
• How much “expert” knowledge needs to be included in a general nonfiction book?
• What are some models I can use to determine page length?
• Have any studies been done in the last three years that look directly at writing difficulties and ADHD?
• Who determines the standard criteria?
• Are their any generally accepted disputes regarding the standard criteria?

And make this new list.

Research genre features of general nonfiction

• What is the typical length of a book of this kind?
• How much “expert” knowledge needs to be included in a general nonfiction book?

• What are some models I can use to determine page length?

Establish the place of writing in ADHD research

• Have any studies been done in the last three years that look directly at writing difficulties and ADHD?
• Can I apply research that refers to executive function directly to writing obviously and clearly using Zimmerman as a bridge

Pin down the current (2020) agreement about ADHD in neuro/cog sci research

• What are the current standard diagnostic criteria for ADHD?
• Who determines the standard criteria?
• Are their any generally accepted disputes regarding the standard criteria?

Create a Project List

Take out a sheet of paper and write, Project List Draft at the top of it.

Review your questions and categories.

Make a list of projects that you need to complete to complete the product you need to produce.  

Here is a project list for a project I am working on:

• Complete visual outline
• Organize draft text according to outline
• Annotate and categorize November/December draft
• Identify features of current general nonfiction in my area

• Establish the place of writing in ADHD research

Next Action lists work in tandem with your Project List.

I create a separate Next Action list for each project. I put each project on a separate sheet of paper. I review them, typically weekly, and use to set my goals for each work session, or day, or  week.  Over time, I review and revise. Projects are completed, and new projects and next actions emerge.

Merlin Mann, whose blog 52 Folders is popular with free lancers contrasts Next Actions lists with To Do Lists.

Next action lists only hold your next actions.

For example, a classic old-school to-do might be something like “Plan Tom’s Surprise Going-Away Party,” “Clean out the Garage,” or “Get the Car Fixed.” But, as Allen cannily notes, these are each really small projects since they require more than one activity in order to be considered complete.

Learning to honor that distinction between a task and its parent project may, in fact, be the most important step you can take toward improving the quality and “do-ability” of the work on your list.

By always breaking projects of any size into their true constituent next actions–and it’s definitely okay to have several at once per project–we’re making it fast and easy to always know what should be happening next.

Next action lists enable you to keep putting one foot in front of the other, ensuring that you always know what to do next, instead of half-assing your way through a badly-defined pile of fuzzy nouns. This physicality and functional piece-work act in concert to make the planning and execution of your tasks as stress-free and un-intimidating as possible.

                               Merlin Mann

MerlinMann also has some interesting thoughts about how to articulate your actions.

Articulate your to-dos in terms of physical activity–even when they require only modest amounts of actual exertion. To do so ensures that you’ve thought through your task to a point where you can envision how it will need to be undertaken and what it will actually feel like once you’re doing it.  This means you can easily visualize the activity, the kinds of tools you’ll need, and perhaps even the setting where the work should take place.

Get the verbs right. Notice how we’re breaking these Big Nouns into little verbs?That’s deliberate.With that original to-do for your presentation, you might theoretically just keep “preparing” your presentation until some arbitrary alarm bell goes off in your head, saying “Yeah, okay, that looks like a fully-prepared presentation, so you can stop.” But a better-defined chunk of activity suggests a task with clear edges; it has a beginning and an end.

Create A Draft Next Action List for Each Project

Select a project from your list and write its name at the top of a sheet of paper.

On this list, generate a list of next actions.

• Try phrasing your task in a form like:“verb the noun with the object.”
• Not  “Year-end report,” but  “Download Q3 spreadsheet from work server.”
• Not “Meet with Anil,” you’d probably want to “Email Anil on Monday to schedule monthly disco funk party.”

Choose another project and start another list on another page.

Move back and forth between your lists and your questions to answer.