I feel the author's pain. My to do lists are miles long and it can be overwhelming. However, rather than abandoning GTD, the solution is deciding what projects are priorities, what can be delegated, and what you should just strike from your list. Your time and attention is finite, 'curating' your GTD lists is a necessity.
But is GTD really suited to prioritizing your projects? It's mostly your current projects and then you get to work in contexts across various projects, which prevents you from focusing on one project for long periods of time.
The solution I use to this problem is to use a to-do heap, where I can only see what's on top of the heap. From there I can either delete the task or push it down further in the heap and move on to the next task. By preventing myself from seeing more than one task at a time, I'm forced to focus on the task at the top of the heap, or make a reasonable decision as to how far down in the heap I want to defer it. Persona…
This is actually the same method I have attempted to use for myself in the past.
My natural (non)system is to work on whatever I feel like until bored. Then to work on whatever else I feel like until bored. Continue. It used to trouble me greatly, and I tried using Things, all sorts of custom text files, sticky notes, and many other devices to force myself into a predictable pattern of work. What I found though is that the natural system self corrects. All the time spent on any project or interes…
I mostly use this system. My problem is when I'm bored with everything, which is frequently these days. Then I find it difficult to get started (though once I do, I tend to be productive). In that mode I tend to be deadline driven.
My natural (non)system is to work on whatever I feel like until bored. Then to work on whatever else I feel like until bored. Continue. It used to trouble me greatly, and I tried using Things, all sorts of custom text files, sticky notes, and many other devices to force myself into a predictable pattern of work. What I found though is that the natural system self corrects. All the time spent on any project or interes…
It sounds like intuitively you know what's important in the long-run and what interests you. However, the challenge occurs when you face a short-term hurdle that is required for your long-term goal but that short-term hurdle is something that you're not interested in. What do you do then?
Just get it over with quickly, or procrastinate. Doesn't sound like a great solution, but the necessary and urgent stuff always gets done, and the stuff that gets procrastinated sometimes turns out to be not that important in retrospect. To be fair, this system is not ideal for deadlines or urgent projects - those usually require switching to a more rigid alternate system to ensure timely completion.
For me any old list of tasks will do, but for each task I have to be very careful about keeping a context I can jump into with as little friction as possible. That means a record of the current state of the project and basic usage notes for the tools involved. Maybe I'm just lazy, but when it comes to picking up an old task, nothing turns me off like spending half an hour figuring out where the hell I left off two weeks ago and then another half hour relearning the tools I was using.
Combining that information with any kind of task tracking or TODO list has never worked for me, which means task tracking is of secondary importance for me compared to note-taking.
The solution I use to this problem is to use a to-do heap, where I can only see what's on top of the heap. From there I can either delete the task or push it down further in the heap and move on to the next task. By preventing myself from seeing more than one task at a time, I'm forced to focus on the task at the top of the heap, or make a reasonable decision as to how far down in the heap I want to defer it. Persona…
How often do you go through the heap to prioritize the cards?
I never go through the entire heap; there are some tasks down at the bottom that I'll probably never get around to, as I typically add more things each day than I take out. Usually I'll defer 3-5 tasks that I don't want to do at the moment before settling on working on one. Recurring tasks I'll just defer down again when I complete them.
For me, motivation is the key and projects that don't involve a customer or end user or someone directly benefiting from the tasks involved don't get completed.
Obviously, you can envision someone benefiting from long term projects. But that is not the same thing as an actual person actually benefitting. You can't imagine it. You can't fake it. You need it.
So find some way to get real people involved in what you want to accomplish.
I feel the author's pain. My to do lists are miles long and it can be overwhelming. However, rather than abandoning GTD, the solution is deciding what projects are priorities, what can be delegated, and what you should just strike from your list. Your time and attention is finite, 'curating' your GTD lists is a necessity.
But is GTD really suited to prioritizing your projects? It's mostly your current projects and then you get to work in contexts across various projects, which prevents you from focusing on one project for long periods of time.
According the David Allen book, you should also be keeping track of your long term goals and making sure you're doing (or not doing as the case may be) the things necessary to reach those goals.
The tendency is to fill up your task software with dozens of projects and tasks under each project. But the more you look at your projects and tasks every day for the next few weeks, it gets discouraging. It feels like a never-ending river of stress. Two points on GTD that deal with this: - Part of writing everything to down is to get it out of your head so you don't worry about it. If you have a bunch of big detaile…
But how do you know what's on your plate today with GTD? Usually the prescribed approach is to go into a context (ie, @email or @phone) and start plugging away at the next actions from various projects that require you to be in that context. Great if you're in a straitforward task job like sales but not good for creativity and getting creative work done. It's too rigid and the focus is on the granular next actionable…
Keeping an active inventory of your commitments (including a calendar for day to day items) allows for a couple of things:
1. Removing latent anxiety related to trying to keep track of all that needs to be done, which can in turn free one to focus on creative pursuits.
2. Making conscience decisions to defer certain projects and goals, which can also have quite a liberating effect.