Purpose statements in task management

As soon as you wanted to act, you started planning. Your intention was your purpose, and it triggered your internal planning process[…]

from David Allen’s “Making It All Work”.

A written purpose keeps individual notes from becoming trash as soon as the context they were created in is forgotten. In projects a written purpose prompts next actions and establishes the project goal.

In my early GTD days several reviews had me cleaning up actions and projects that I no longer understood what they referred to or why I must do it.

*○  NEXT  Read 3ds Max 5 manuals

 2024-11-26 Wed  21:25 

Coming back to a note such as this on a review will have me asking “Why is this here?” and force me to go figure out what I need to read about in the manuals. I’ll have to look at the project and infer what from whatever I previously recorded. In an action list this note is mere clutter. I’ll read it and know it really means “Figure out what I need from the 3ds Max 5 manuals”. This action hasn’t been clarified at all. It isn’t clear because it has no purpose.

*○  NEXT  RD export plugins in 3ds Max 5 manuals
I want to reverse engineer a custom exporter to port it to Blender and need an
overview of the object pipeline and clues as to how the data might be
serialized.

 2024-11-26 Wed  21:25 

Off the bat I know I need to go to the manuals and look for ’exporting’ meaning I can begin just by glancing at an actions list and not even interact with my notes. Should I need further guidance to interpret the manual I only need jump to this note. The purpose sentence tells me what I need to extract from the manual. This makes this action atomic, it can be completed with no knowledge of the overarching project.

Projects are akin to Theseus’s ship and compound the pain. Completing project actions generates modifications to the project definition. If purpose is implicitly derived from the actions definitions or support material then it will be modified as well and potentially lost. Writing down the purpose of a project and respecting it as a boundary keeps the goal intact. A purpose statement should be further clarified or augmented but shouldn’t be deviated from the original. A modification of the purpose means it’s time to cancel or complete this project and begin anew. This shields my system from neverending projects and generates documentation on my unrealized goal upon archiving.

Apropos archiving purpose provides valuable context: the problems I was solving. Archiving purposeless notes creates lists of dates and solutions which get less intelligble as time goes on. This smarts, most of time I don’t look at the archive but when I do it’s to recover data. Information that was never recorded is irretrievable.