I’m really interested in this angle to productivity. With GTDInbox, all we (currently) really concentrate on is the day to day details. Which; while great for actually getting things done, doesn’t solve the “headless chicken” problem of knowing you’ve got stuff to do, but no longer knowing _why_. I.e. no overarching ‘goal’.

In the case of GTD, I’ve always maintained – along with Allen’s thinking – that a ‘Project’ is your goal. The view that you never achieve a goal (Project), you just do ‘tasks’ that slowly lead you towards ‘close-enough’ to completion. After all, what exactly is ‘complete’? To define that would be pointless, and immensely time consuming: a variation of the 80/20 rule (80% is ‘good enough’, 100% is ‘complete’).

But for me, there is no bridge between an ‘action’/'task’ and a ‘Goal’. Suppose I had a goal to “Double the value of my house”. That would not immediately require ‘actions’. I would want to break it into Projects – “Decorate Dining Room”, “Add Conservatory”, etc.
What I’m saying is, Projects need a high level to be grouped into, and that’s where Desires/Goals come in.

For me, that’s step one. The tricky part is that’s just increased the maintenance load to be productive (3 layers is quite a lot of mental work).

The next stage is then quantifying those actions.
When you don’t know what complete is, how can you tell how close you are?! You can know how much you’ve achieved.

There are all sorts of questions once you have metrics,
* How much of the work I did was valuable (point: what can I cut out in future to achieve more?)
* How close am I to hitting my goals? (as a %)
* What stands between me and hitting my goals? (tasks left)
* What are the chances of hitting the goals before their deadline (how much to do vs. time left) -> this relates to your quote, ‘underestimate what you can do in a year’.

Then there’s your point, the ‘motivation to keep going’. I like that.
I like the idea you can look at an old Project, see how long it took, see what actions it was composed of, and use that as a predictor for future Projects.
I like the idea you can have the instant ‘strike-off’ satisfaction of getting things done, anytime, just by looking at recent projects/tasks achieved.
I like the fact you can look and see “well, it seems I have more of this year left than I thought I did!”, and then do more. And on that, I like the fact a system like this would let you plan your year in such broad strokes. You know, define a ‘goal’ and estimate time taken. Then, the second you start adding Actions (with their own mini time estimate), the Goal no longer has a time estimate, instead, the time is based on the Actions still to do (basically, build time predictions bottom up, except at the very beginning). On that note, I tend to make very crude time estimations to the nearest 30/60 minutes, to work out what I can achieve in any day.

Why is this relevant? One of the things that is ‘itching’ us over at GTDInbox is the ultimate (which for me, is also the most simple) productivity system. I’d love to engage some more discussion on this topic…