If I get back on the GTD wagon there’s a lesson I want to take with me and really hammer home.
When I’m off GTD the bad thing that happens is that I get an idea for an essay or something and I have to go do it right away because there’s no “bookmark” for it so I get driven by the latest and loudest. Fun, but it happes at the expense of working on bigger projects and if I have more than one new idea at once that feels physically bad from the stress that I can’t “catch” them all.
When I’m on GTD I would “capture” all those ideas into an ever growing system. That way, when I sit down to work I can pick and choose from the things I most want to get done. That works great.
It’s fine that not everything on that huge list is getting done. I’m getting an overview, which helps me pick what matters the most.
It’s fine.
It’s fine until it’s not fine. Usually for me that happens after about three years worth of backlog-growing.
Moving things off the project list into “someday, maybe” or “never” lists helps a little, but doing that too much in some sort of “take numbers six through twenty-five on your list and make an avoid-at-all-costs list so you instead can focus on the top five” hasn’t worked for me either. Heaven knows that I gave that approach a fair shake.
I haven’t figured out a solution yet. Maybe some sort of very elaborate someday-maybe system with org-mode outlines and categories and whatever. Something that’s easy to jam things into and it’s sorted and tidy and browsable. And I would never have to look at it again. I would want to hack together something that shows me those entries in a random order so each weekly review I could look at as many of them as I could stomach. That’s just the first idea, I came up with. Probably not the best. I’m gonna have to keep thinking on this one.