Hello Anita,
Unfortunately there is no way to create sub-projects in Everdo, and probably never will be. This was a design trade-off made early on for various reasons. Mostly because it was perceived that the benefit of nested projects is low when following GTD while the design and implementation cost is high.
If you wish, I could offer a few tips on adapting to this constraint in the spirit of Getting Things Done.
According to GTD, a project is not just a sequence of actions, but a meaningful outcome. Therefore in your example I would just have a project for Finish report or maybe Submit report and think about all the rest as sub-actions, most likely sequential.
So for example, you start by creating a project Finish report. You take a few minutes to brainstorm what the steps to completion might be, for example:
- Research the topic
- Write chapter 1
- …
Notice that Research the topic is not a proper project because it’s not specific. It is also not a proper next action (it lacks clarity of what exactly needs to be done). So you clarify it into Contact [person] and ask about [topic] and possibly a few more next actions. So now you can create several next actions in your project. You can also keep not-yet-clarified actions at the end of your project and get to them later on. The important thing is that you have the actual next actions defined.
Hope this makes sense.