If you are a fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done approach to time management, please consider reading this article, kindly provided by a TimeTo™ user, which argues for using TimeTo™ constructs as the best software approach available to integrate the GTD philosophy. Please note that the article was written in the summer of 2005, and so it reflects TimeTo™ functionality as it existed then.
Additional notes on GTD implementation follow, after the article.
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HOW I IMPLEMENT "GETTING THINGS DONE" USING TIMETO
by gtd-doc@psitek.mailshell.com (and updated by TimeTo staff to keep things current)
(Feel free to pass this document around, or post it anywhere that TimeTo users might hang out together - or feel free to email me for the latest version. I find this approach has worked well for me so far, so there's no reason why others shouldn't benefit from it also).
INTRODUCTION
TimeTo (and Above & Beyond) are unique amongst PIMs in that they do NOT provide you with the standard "To Do" list.
Instead, it provides you with a definite, detailed, minute-by-minute plan for achieving what you want. The plan changes minute-by-minute through the day as new things crop up during the day that would normally play havoc with your schedule.
The plan automatically adapts to whatever you throw at it so you can immediately see when you are over-stretching yourself. And you can immediately see if you really can meet those tight deadlines.
There is a trial version of TimeTo available from David Berman Communications at http://www.TimeTo.org
I have no connection with David Berman Communications- I just think the program is uniquely useful for REALLY getting things done.
"Getting Things Done" (GTD) is the name of a book based on the (revolutionary, in my opinion) time-management methodology of David Allen. (http://www.davidco.com)
MOTIVATION
I've been using the Getting Things Done approach for nearly a couple of years now and I'm totally convinced that it works better than any other time-management system around.
My problem is that I find it hard to keep reminding myself to check actions lists again and again throughout the day to see what is important. I also find it really boring to have to keep checking action/project lists to make sure that the item I have just completed is not part of some bigger project that now needs another next action. I also find it tedious at the weekly review to go through all my active projects (I have alot of them!) to ensure that each has a next action.
I find myself actually skipping my weekly reviews sometimes because I find doing this sort of stuff so boring and tedious even though I know it is worth doing them in the long-run (shame on me, I know).
In fact, I'd rather something or someone else just took care of all that boring stuff for me and presented me with a suggested list of items (based upon deadlines and priorities) from which I can pick and choose according to my intuition and judgement. The problem is that I am the only one who really knows what my priorities are so I need to be fully involved - rather than delegating my entire life to someone else <grin>. This is where the dynamic scheduling power of TimeTo comes in.
Since switching to TimeTo for my GTD approach, my life has literally transformed as far as achieving solid results is concerned. I'm now using my preferred PIM according to my preferred methodology and the combination is proving to be awesome - for me, at least.
I guess others think this way also, hence the popularity of a dynamic- scheduling-style program like Life Balance for the Palm. I've seriously tried Life Balance on a few occasions but the TimeTo approach is really the ultimate approach in my view because of the minute-by-minute scheduling...but then again I don't use TimeTo in quite the same way that most people do or as it was intended to be used, as you will see.
Despite trying just about every other PIM that exists, I keep coming back to TimeTo because it really makes me do the tasks that need to be done - sometimes just through good old nagging - instead of giving me a pretty theoretical plan which I can feel good about and then ignore, or which is rendered worthless by the first interruption.
There is something within me that just NEEDS to see a detailed, structured plan for the day and feel confident that everything important can be achieved - but there is also a part of me that needs to feel free enough to just ignore it on a whim! TimeTo gives me the best of both worlds.
TimeTo does take some getting used to though. I avoided it for years initially because it felt like every moment of my day was being eaten up by some bizarre program that was dictating how I should live my life from minute-to-minute.
It was not until I finally had had enough of the "Microsoft Outlook mentality" of increasingly-long task lists that never seemed to get any shorter, or give me any feeling of progress, that I had the insight of creating "empty appointments" in TimeTo just to have free time to do whatever I wanted. Then I realized that TimeTo was the perfect solution for keeping track of everything that really needed doing in my life while allowing me to REALLY enjoy those downtime moments without guilt.
I get a real Mind-Like-Water experience, as David Allen puts it, from using this program. If I don't feel like doing anything important for today (or the next few hours), I just create an immediate appointment in TimeTo blocking out the next few hours. It automatically reschedules everything and notifies me if there is any deadline that will be blown away by me doing this. Otherwise I can just relax for a few hours knowing that everything is still on track. My entire life is literally dumped into this program so I can be totally relaxed that nothing is slipping through the cracks. It's a great feeling to be "totally free" for a few hours while on a busy schedule.
I run many simultaneous GTD "projects" (personal and professional) side-by-side. (In GTD, a project is any multi-step goal or outcome, even if fairly trivial). Somedays I have a very hectic schedule while other days I have to provide my own inspiration (and motivation) to do things since there is nothing pressing in the short-term but there are many long-term goals to work towards.
So I need to be both reactive and proactive - sometimes switching between one mode and the other very quickly. But I also get bored easily. So I like to intuitively chop and change the tasks I am working on depending on how inspired I feel in the moment. I get much more done when I'm in the mood for doing it than when I am forcing myself to do something I would rather defer until later.
Enjoying my life IN THE PRESENT MOMENT is a major thing for me and using TimeTo is like having someone there constantly to deal with all the mundane stuff while I just "cherry pick" the good stuff I want to do in the moment. When you use this kind of approach, you find that there are times when you genuinely enjoy doing a few boring, mundane things (as a kind of break) and other times when you genuinely enjoy being highly-creative and concentrated. And there are some other times when it's great to just do nothing at all while knowing that everything is still being taken care of.
Items in TimeTo automatically reorganize themselves according to priority and deadlines so my dynamic schedule is always in a state of constant flux. It ebbs and flows according to my whims and moods but I get everything done on time (usually well in advance), with almost no effort because it all seems like fun. But most importantly for me, I genuinely enjoy the process of achieving things.
P.S. In fact, this whole description of how I use TimeTo virtually wrote itself because I only ever did it when I was in the mood for it so it was all fun. Whenever I got bored I just moved on to something else in my schedule that TimeTo suggested I should do.
BENEFITS OF USING TIMETO FOR GTD
- The need to constantly check action lists is taken away. TimeTo handles all deadlines and prioritizing.
- Once all your tasks and projects are in TimeTo™, you can REALLY relax and just play with your schedule knowing that if you push it too far, TimeTo will let you know that you cannot possibly meet a deadline.
- You don't have to think upfront about the right Next Actions. TimeTo will automatically surface tasks (even "amorphous blob" tasks) when it is time to work on them. You can then do some "natural planning" (as David Allen calls it) in the Note section of that item to define and highlight Next Actions and future actions.
- It helps enormously with time discipline so you don't end up leaving stuff until the last minute. In the past, I have often left it too late to do Next Actions off my actions list. If there is any danger of that for a particular project or task, I just set the duration of the task to an amount of time that I think the entire project would require (in an ideal interruption-free world) and TimeTo automatically watches to make sure that there is sufficient time available.
- You always have a feeling of progress even when tackling massive tasks. Using the splittable items feature will allow TimeTo to let you work a bit at a time on a large task and keep coming back to it when you feel like it.
- You automatically get a daily record of events which I find very useful both when weekly reviewing and also when wanting to know how I exactly spent my time on any particular day.
- You don't have to think anymore about whether the action you are just completing is part of a larger project. TimeTo has a "clone" feature which, on completion of a particular task, will ask you if you want to schedule the next one. In my approach, I use this extensively to set a Next Action on completion of a previous Next Action.
- You can be sure that everything you are doing is moving you to towards accomplishing significant goals and projects rather than just being time that is being frittered away unnecessarily on meaningless items
- Assigning Next Actions to projects during Weekly reviews are much simplified (more on this later) - and are often not necessary at all.
WEAKNESSES OF USING TIMETO FOR GTD
- TimeTo will only sync one-way to your Palm. Effectively, your appointments book will be read-only since it will be overwritten at each sync - plus you will not have any dynamic scheduling. At first, this was a major stumbling block for me and I installed and uninstalled several times because I kept on believing it was a major stumbling block. But over a period of months, I've noticed just how much benefit I get from the way that TimeTo structures and automatically sorts out my day for me minute-by-minute so I am now prepared to just buy a laptop and carry it from location to location if necessary just to use the program.
- TimeTo has a very limited outliner so you have to use the Browse Notes view and just indent text using the Tab key if you want to simulate outlines. Actually, this is no worse than using a vanilla Palm and keyboard really - something I've done quite a lot of in the past. In fact, this entire document was written in a TimeTo note over a few days in spare moments. I just outlined using the Tab key.
- It is a complex program using some clever algorithms to figure out which are your most important next actions. You have to trust it to pull up the right things at the right time. If you don't have faith in the program (or computers in general), this may not be for you. It also goes against the pure principle of simplicity in the GTD approach by using such a complex piece of software however it works wonders for me so is it really so bad? (The GTD Police probably wouldn't agree!)
- To use TimeTo effectively, you really need access to a PC all day long. That's not a problem for me since I sit at a PC all day at work and have one on all the time at home. I just sync TimeTo between the two locations as I travel between them.
- TimeTo is so different from "normal" PIMs that it does take time to appreciate that it really does work and it does take time to really appreciate the thought that has been put into the program. There are features that only make sense after you've used it for a while. I usually recommend people try it seriously for a couple of weeks before passing final judgement.
- You risk being jailed by the GTD Police for not using "pure" GTD <grin>
HOW TO DO IT...SETTING UP TIMETO FOR GTD
All the following setup might sound terribly complex but it really isn't at all once you understand why I am doing it this way. It's just that explaining stuff in written words can take a long time whereas the actual actions themselves literally take seconds once you know what you are doing.
My GTD approach has gradually evolved out of quite a few weeks of intensively using TimeTo with the deliberate intention of trying to figure out some way to get it to work in a "higher-level" way than just the clever task scheduler it might at first appear to be. Because of this, it is easy for me to assume that everyone else does something the way I have now got used to it when, in fact, it may not be obvious at all to even an experienced user. So, if there is anything unclear, please ask!
Most of my day, I can almost forget that I am using TimeTo and it might seem to an outsider that I am not using it much at all even though it is always running on my PC. I just dart in occasionally to see what's next, maybe shift a few things around depending on work pressures but most of the time I'm just focused on the "next action" that interests me the most at that moment.
That's at the heart of my motivation for using TimeTo. I spend time doing and ENJOYING doing - instead of just planning and then having those plans wrecked by something unexpected. With TimeTo, I can be sure that what I am doing is (probably) the most important thing I can be doing at that time.
THE KEY IDEA IS...
TimeTo together with GTD represents a powerful combination of human-mind and machine-mind. The computer produces a candidate list of the most important stuff to do, and then human intuition selects from that list in the moment of action.
And importantly, I can confidently spend time NOT DOING and be sure that there is nothing in my life that I'm allowing to "fall between the cracks".
The following subsections are in no particular order - they are just snippets of what combines together to become an overall "TimeTo + GTD" approach. It would be a good idea to read through them all first to get an overall feel in your mind for the approach before trying anything yourself. Otherwise, you may get very confused as to why I am doing certain things in certain ways. This approach is written for advanced TimeTo users so I've not explained much about the TimeTo features being used. If you are a beginner and need help understanding features, just ask and I'm sure someone will help out.
I don't have time at the moment (or so TimeTo tells me!) to write all this up into a completely perfect document but I still want to get you started on using TimeTo this way if you like the sound of it. So I figure this "random thoughts" approach is probably a reasonable compromise.
I'm sure there must be bits I've failed to explain properly or even bits I've missed out. I apologize in advance for this and suggest you post a question if are confused about any aspect of this.
INBOX
Your ultimate electronic inbox is TimeTo itself.
All your GTD collection buckets should ultimately feed into this. If you are at your PC when an idea or task occurs then just dump it into TimeTo straight away and get it off your mind. For other non-computer occasions, you'll have to work out your collection method. I carry a mini-digital voice recorder everywhere I go to record random thoughts and ideas and tasks. I have a recurring daily TimeTo item to make sure I empty it into TimeTo daily.
ENTERING GTD TASKS
The only important things to fill-in upfront when entering a task are the description (obviously) and any deadline, plus the appropriate priority (see Priority Codes below).
It is important you fill in these items as soon as you can since this is what TimeTo uses to perform the magic of dynamic scheduling.
If I am under pressure and the items are coming in thick and fast and I have no time to think about deadlines or priority yet, I leave the priority as blank. This marks it as "new" in the TimeTo priority list. This means that TimeTo makes that tasks the highest priority of all and it keeps surfacing to the top of the schedule automatically until I assign it a proper priority. This is a very handy failsafe mechanism when you can't afford even a few seconds of upfront thinking time.
What I find interesting is that I don't need to think about what the "next action" should be at this point. This is handy if the items are coming in thick and fast. I can just dump my mind into the program and deal with it all later when things calm down a bit. (I have the default duration of new items set to 30 mins in New Item Preferences (from the Settings menu), with Offer To Clone When Item Done on by default.)
Because TimeTo automatically surfaces important stuff, you will soon notice that you are scheduled to perform a vague unknown item. At this point you will realize that you need to do some GTD "natural planning" on that particular item. (See GTD book - or audiobook - for description of "natural planning"). More on breaking down vague, unknown items (or "amorphous blobs") later.
PRIORITY TIERS
My TimeTo priority tiers are used as follows: (These descriptions are not entered anywhere - it is just the meaning that I assign to each letter in the priority list)
A = "must do as soon as possible"
B = "do whenever there is time"
C = "someday/maybe"
O = "out" (equivalent to @errands in GTD)
T = "talk" (equivalent to @agenda in GTD)
W = "Waiting For" (same as GTD)
TIMETO PROJECTS (Not to be confused with GTD projects)
Unlike most people, I only use TimeTo's Projects as higher-level "how is my life balanced overall?" type categories, not as things to be accomplished. Each project is defined as Franklin-Covey "roles" or Tony Robbins' "categories of improvement" (from Time of Your Life) type of thing.
This means that I can look at the colour rectangles (that prefix each item) for a day (in Day View) or for a week (in Multiple Day View) and get a feeling for the colours that are dominating or non-dominating and adjust accordingly. I know this is vague but going too much into this here is getting away from my GTD approach so I'll be brief on this bit. The higher-level stuff is also a very personal thing anyway that everyone seems to want to approach slightly differently so figure it out for yourself!
It's the lower-level concrete items that seem best suited to particular solid methods.
MY DAILY SCHEDULE
I often don't do the day's items in the order that TimeTo suggests but I use the software's opinion as my safety net in case I go too far and start putting too much pressure on myself by deferring items. I pick and choose from the day's schedule what I want to do as the day goes on and I "press f5" (TimeTo's Start command which start elapsed time within an item) on things that I notice that I would rather do now than later. This brings them automatically to the current time on today's schedule. Occasionally, intuition suggests something that TimeTo has put on the next day's list or even further ahead. Here I just pull the task over to today's schedule and give it a Fixed Date of today if necessary. (I usually don't bother spending time altering the item's Priority unless the task is part of a project that is now of much higher priority.)
If I get bored and want to try something else, I might just hit <CTRL>+ <f6> to mark the item as Done For Now & Finish Later and move onto something else until I feel inspired again to return to the original item. I might also use the <ALT>+<LEFT ARROW> or <ALT>+<RIGHT ARROW> keys to adjust an item's Duration up or down, now that I've worked on it a bit and know a bit better how long it will really take. I do this many, many, many times each day and TimeTo just recalculates my schedule accordingly.
"OFFER TO CLONE WHEN ITEM DONE" SETTING
Set the Offer To Clone When Item Done checkbox as checked in New Item Preferences (from the Settings menu). This is important for the reasons outlined in the following sections.
SHARED NOTES
The way TimeTo uses Shared Notes for duplicate items is key to this entire approach. If you duplicate an item in TimeTo™, then it will share any Notes between them automatically. So if you have an item with Offer To Clone When Item Done checked then when you mark it Done in TimeTo™, a little dialog pops up asking if you want to schedule a duplicate item.
In GTD, items are really bookmarks for projects. So if in the current sitting you have completely finished the project, you can say No to this dialog, because the item is over. Otherwise, after you click Yes, you can click on the Note button for the new duplicated item and up pops your project planning that you have done for this project within the item you marked as Done.
Use the Note as a basic outliner and idea storage place for each project - rather like you would on the Palm. You can use the Tab key to indent text so that you can get some sort of outlining.
Note that, in this method, every Note relating to the project is automatically attached to each item in the project. This is accomplished automatically by using the "Offer To Clone When Item Done " feature.
For massive amounts of text notes, I use a separate program (Zoot) to store the information.
TURNING A STANDARD TIMETO ITEM INTO A GTD PROJECT TASK
Just put "[" and "]" around the item's Title and write the next action in front of that.
For example, to turn "Write Report" into a project with a next action task of "Get a pen from stationery cupboard" would become "Get a pen from stationery cupboard [Write Report]". That is, you just put the brackets around the original task and add the "next action" in front.
It just takes a moment to do this once you realize that you have an "amorphous blob" task (i.e. GTD project) instead of a real next action item. You can also do a quick check to see that the "Offer To Coine When Item Done" checkbox is checked (but you should have this on by default already).
The reason for using the "[" symbol is for easy filtering of projects, which I explain later on.
AFTER COMPLETING AN ITEM CONTAINING AN ENTIRE GTD PROJECT (as just described)
The "Offer To Clone When Item Done " dialog should appear since you have checked the Offer To Clone When Item Done checkbox.
If this is a project item like "Get a pen from stationery cupboard [Write Report]" you can just click "Yes" and a new item is created with all the same settings (and, most importantly, the same Note). All you do is click on your Note (or just use your intuition) and decide what the next action should be (so this item might be "Fill pen with ink [Write Report]") ...you just change the item's Title in the newly-created duplicate task but leave the GTD project name intact to be carried forward. The Note will also be carried forward automatically - which is key to making the system work.
Eventually when the project is complete as you mark the item containing it as Done, you can click "No" to the "Offer To Clone When Item Done" dialog and that's the end of that GTD project.
Remember that in GTD, task items are merely "bookmarks" for reminding you where you currently stand on an uncompleted project. This means that you only ever need to know the project name and the next action. Every other task or idea pertaining to the project is hidden away in the Note. So, in this way, you can be storing hundreds of potential tasks in TimeTo Notes, yet there are only a handful of actual "next actions" on your schedule. This, in itself, is a massive stress reliever.
Also, don't worry about Durations too much (a rough estimate is fine) - I leave durations at 30 minutes on many items that I can't be bothered to estimate because I leave it up to my intuition how much time I want to spend progressing any particular project before I get bored. I press "f5" (Start Item command) as I get back into a project via a next action and TimeTo automatically updates my schedule. I hit <CTRL>+<f6> (Done For Now & Finish Later command) as I leave a next action which has not been fully completed.
(If the next action was fully completed, I would hit <SPACEBAR> (the Done command) and the "Offer To Clone When Item Done" dialog appears as mentioned above).
As I get clearer on how long something will really take, I can adjust the Duration easily on the schedule itself using <ALT>+<LEFT ARROW> and <ALT>+<RIGHT ARROW> for Shorter Duration and Longer Duration commands.
LABELS
These act as your location contexts such as @work, @home, etc. Note that this is a different use for them than many users but I think TimeTo is more useful when doing it my way! <grin>
Setting labels will colour-code your items' titles (the actual text colour changes) so that you can instantly see which items can be done together. For example, if I have just done a blue task then I know I am in the right location to do other blue tasks as well. I don't even need to know what the blue colour represents. You should go into Labels Settings and change the default colours to colours you are happy with and which look very different to each other.
Don't use the "none" or the "special day" (Label 7) labels as contexts. The "none" label is for items you have not assigned a context to (I set the default colour for this label to a light-grey colour - such as the normal default "tentative" label colour so that the item description looks faint on the screen compared to all the other colours. That reminds me to set labels for items that look faint on the screen: otherwise I have trouble reading them!) Any item that has the "special day" label causes the title of the day upon which that item is scheduled to appear in a highlight colour (designated in Labels Settings) to indicate a really special thing is happening that day.
The contexts I have defined are: work, home, internet, computer, calls, out. Unfortunately, you are limited to 8 labels, so you have so choose your contexts wisely! I hope this limit will be increased in a future version of TimeTo.
"Out" just indicates that the I am going to be "out and about" during that appointment/item so whenever I see that colour, I know that I can take a quick look at the items with priority tier "O" at the bottom of my Priority View (<CTRL>+R) (the "Out" items).
You'll know when you're doing this "labels trick" right because your daily schedules will look like multi-coloured rainbows! Very quickly, you'll start to appreciate what each colour represents, and just by the overall colours you see you can tell what location TimeTo thinks you should be spending most of your time at that day.
FILTERING CONTEXTS (LOCATIONS)
For today's schedule, you can just see by looking at the colours what can be done where ...or you can Filter using the Label property to pull up work, home, Internet, etc. items.
To use the Filters approach to get a complete overview, go to the Priority View (<CTRL>+R), then press <SHIFT>+F to turn on Filters, check the Labels checkbox and press the Labels button to choose which contexts to include.
Notice that you can choose a number of labels at the same time (so you can see stuff you can see, for example, "home + computer + talk" items all at once, which is useful sometimes.
TimeTo will remember your filtering choices the next time you use Filters, so it doesn't amount to as many keystrokes next time.
DAILY REVIEW
I have one five-minute daily recurring item to "read through O, T, W priority items (= OUT, TALK, WAITING FOR)" just to keep on top of them, since, unlike in pure GTD, these items are slightly hidden away down at the bottom of the Priority View.
FILTERING PROJECTS
You can Filter on Title contains the "[" character (<SHIFT>+F with Title = "[" ) to find all GTD projects worked on in the past week (scroll backwards and forwards in the Day View to scan the days in your last week of Done items, to see what projects you made progress on. The use of this is mentioned in the next section.
TIMETO THINGS TO DO AT YOUR GTD WEEKLY REVIEW
Do your GTD weekly review as normal but also do these additional items...
- check you've not lost any projects during the week by failing to do appropriate "Clone" actions. Find these by filtering on the "[" character, as mentioned above. Each item that you have done that pertains to a project will show up as Done items in each day's view for past days. Quickly scan the project names. If you suspect that you don't see one of them on your current Priority Vist anymore (i.e. you forgot to clone for some reason), just hit <CTRL>+R and switch to the filtered Priority View and you will see it there (or not) immediately, or Filter on a word you know was in the item's title. Flicking backwards and forwards (using <CTRL>+S for Day View and <CTRL>+R> for Priority View) like this makes it very easy to see if you have accidentally lost any GTD projects. (NOTE: Only items with flexible dates will show up in your Priority View: if you want to see all items in one list then instead choose the Alphabetical View <CTRL>+A.)
- check that there are no items with priority tier C (someday/maybe) that deserve prompt action. To give them the priority they deserve, just change their Priority Tier to A or B and set their Priority Rank to whatever you think is appropriate relative to all the other items of that Priority Tier... or give them deadlines if they deserve one.
- Take a general look over your Priorities for each item in the Priority view (<CTRL>+R) and drag items up and down until you feel generally happy. You might want to schedule a recurring item every few days (or more often) to do this, if it matters a lot to you.
AN EXAMPLE OF MY APPROACH
This is just a quick journal of what I did to get started in writing up this document, to give some real-life illustration of the approach....
After making my initial commitment that I would be willing to explain how to use TimeTo in the Yahoo group if there was interest, I entered "check Yahoo Group and write up TimeTo approach if enough interest" as an item with a Flexible Date and a Deadline of "3" (for three days into the future). I left the time as the default 30 minutes. The item was now on my Day View for today.
I then pressed Ctrl+E from my Day View to bring up the Note for the item, and dumped a few ideas for things I would mention in this document straight into the Note so I would remember them if I had to explain coherently what I do to another person. This was just to get them off my mind and get back to "mind like water" status.
After about 10 minutes or so of brainstorming, I realised that there were quite a few subtleties to what I was doing and since I did not have a lot of time at the moment, it would be better to change "check Yahoo group and write up TimeTo approach if enough interest" into a GTD project and "check Yahoo group" would be one task in the project and "Brainstorm ideas to explain" would be another task.
So I then pressed Enter to open the item's properties and added squared brackets around the Title so that it now read "[write up TimeTo approach if enough interest]", then and dumped a few more ideas into the Note. I then cut and pasted the "next action" item (in this case "Brainstorm ideas to explain") from the Note and prefixed it to the item's title. I then changed the Deadline field to blank, and changed the Priority Tier to B (indicating to do whenever I have time - i.e. important but not urgent task).
(If I was doing this without keeping this journal at the same time, the whole process would have taken me a few seconds. I do this sort of thing many times during my day as ideas bubble up or "amorphous blobs" appear on my schedule.)
I then clicked OK to save the modified item and then noticed the text was coloured a faint light grey (which indicated no context label yet assigned). So I right-clicked on the item and set the context to "computer" (since I can only do this when I am at my computer) and the item's title became the appropriate colour for that context label. TimeTo just seamlessly slipped this GTD project into my schedule.
I later expanded the time required for this project (using the Longer Duration command <ALT>+<RIGHT ARROW>) to something a lot larger than 30 minutes as it became clear that this would be a reasonably-sized document.
Hopefully, you can get some idea how this task evolved from an "amorphous blob" into precise tasks within a TimeTo item representing a GTD project that led to the creation of this document. There was minimal organizational and tracking of this project since TimeTo just kept it going in my spare moments, and I only worked on it when I felt like doing so.
CONCLUSION
I hope you can begin to make sense of all this. It is more tricky to explain in words than it is to do in practice so give it a try and see what you think. If you have questions, post them to the forum, read the TimeTo help, or contact TimeTo support.
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