If you are a real estate agent, sell consulting services, or develop proposals for a relatively small number of prospective clients in any profession, you will likely find it useful to see all of your outstanding "sales relationships in progress" in one view. This could be a separate list in your planner called "Client Projects in Development," or if you already have file folders for each in-progress project, it may suffice to group them all in one file stand on your credenza. Just realize that this approach will work only if it represents a complete set of all of those situations that require action, and only if you review them regularly along with the rest of your projects, keeping them current and conscious.
What About Subprojects?
Some of your projects will likely have major subprojects, each of which could in theory be seen as a whole project. If you're moving into a new house, for instance, and are upgrading and changing much of the property, you may have a list of actionable items like" Finalize landscaping," "Renovate kitchen," "Rewire basement,"and so on, all of which could in themselves be considered separate projects. Do you make all of this one entry on your "Projects" list — say, "Finish new home renovations" — or do you write up each of the subprojects as an individual line item?
Actually, it won't matter, as long as you review all the components of the project as frequently as you need to to stay productive. No external tool or organizing format is going to be perfect for sorting both horizontally across and vertically down through all your projects; you'll still have to be aware of the whole in some cohesive way (such as via your Weekly Review). If you make the large project your one listing on your "Projects" list, you'll want to keep a list of the subprojects and/or the project plan itself as "project support material" to be reviewed when you come to that major item. I would recommend doing it this way if big pieces of the project are dependent on other pieces getting done first. In that scenario you might have subprojects with no next actions attached to them because they are in a sense "waiting for" other things to happen before they can move forward. For instance, you might not be able to start on "Renovate kitchen" until you finish "Rewire basement." However, you might be able to proceed on "Finalize landscaping" independent of either of the other subprojects. You would therefore want a next action to be continually current on "Rewire basement" and "Finalize landscaping."
Don't be too concerned about which way is best. If you're not sure, I'd vote for putting your Big Projects on the "Projects" list and holding the subpieces in your project support material, making sure to include them in your Weekly Review, If that arrangement doesn't feel quite right, try including the active and independent subprojects as separate entries on your master list.
How you list projects and subprojects is up to you; just be sure you know where to find all the moving parts.
There's no perfect system for tracking all your projects and subprojects the same way. You just need to know you have projects and, if they have associated components, where to find the appropriate reminders for them.
Project Support Materials
Project support materials are not project actions, and they're not project reminders. They're resources to support your actions and thinking about your projects.
Don't Use Support Material for Reminding Typically, people use stacks of papers and thickly stuffed file folders as reminders that (1) they've got a project, and (2) they've got to do something about it. They're essentially making support materials serve as action reminders. The problem is that next actions and "Waiting For" items on these projects have usually not been determined and are psychologically still embedded in the stacks and the folders— giving them the aura of just more "stuff" that repels its (un)organizer instead of attracting him or her to action. When you're on the run, in the heat of the activities of the day, files like that are the last thing you'll want to pick up and peruse for actions. You'll actually go numb to the files and the piles because they don't prompt you to do anything and they simply create more anxiety.
If you're in this kind of situation, you must first add the project itself to your "Projects" list, as a reminder that there's an out-come to be achieved. Then the action steps and "Waiting For" items must be put onto their appropriate action reminder lists. Finally, when it's time to actually do an action, like making a call to someone about the project, you can pull out all the materials you think you might need to have as support during the conversation.
To reiterate, you don't want to use support materials as your primary reminders of what to do — that should be relegated to your action lists. If, however, the materials contain project plans and overviews in addition to ad hoc archival and reference information, you may want to keep them a little more visibly accessible than you do the pure reference materials in your filing cabinet. The latter place is fine for support stuff, too, so long as you have the discipline to pull out the file drawer and take a look at the plan every time you do your Weekly Review. If not, you're better off storing those kinds of project support files in a standing file holder or a separate "Pending" stack-basket on your desk or credenza.
To return to the previous example of moving into a new house, you could have a folder labeled "New House" containing all the plans and details and notes about the landscaping and the kitchen and the basement. In your Weekly Review, when you came to "Finish new home renovations" on your "Projects" list, you'd pull out the "New House" file and thumb through all your notes to ensure that you weren't missing any possible next actions. Those actions would then get done, delegated, or deferred onto your action lists, and the folder would be refiled until you needed it again for doing the actions or for your next Weekly Review.
Many people who interact with prospects and clients have attempted to use client folders and/or contact-management software such as Act! to "manage the account." The problem here is that some material is just facts or historical data that needs to be stored as background for when you might be able to use it, and some of what must be tracked is the actions required to move the relationships forward. The latter can be more effectively organized within your action-lists system. Client in-formation is just that, and it can be folded into a general-reference file on the client or stored within a client-focused library. (I use Act! for the single great feature it offers of allowing me to cross-reference general company information and significant interactions with key people within the company. It's just a good client-centered database.) If I need to call a client, I don't want that reminder embedded anywhere but on my "Calls" list.
Organizing Ad Hoc Project Thinking
In chapter 3, I suggested that you will often have ideas that you'll want to keep about projects but that are not necessarily next actions. Those ideas fall into the broad category of "project support materials," and may be anything from a notion about some-thing you might want to do on your next vacation to a clarification of some major components in a project plan. These thoughts could come as you're driving down the freeway listening to a news story on the radio, or reading a relevant article. What do you do with that kind of material?