On Sunday, January 11, 2015 at 8:01:13 AM UTC-5, John Smith wrote: > > I guess things that aren't QUITE ready yet could usefully be hidden > [behind "hide branch in to-do"] rather than buried in my Someday-Maybe > folder. >
The most compelling lesson I learned studying GTD was that every bit of my brain-power used reminding myself of some task I shouldn't forget is that much less brainpower available for working on executing my tasks. So the answer to how much detail to enter into my task list is, enough to free my mind from all the nagging reminders it's carrying. I'm hoping to clear some underbrush in the spring to make a new parking spot. It's been on my mind, so I put it in my profile. I set it as a quarterly goal (I use the MLO "yearly" goal to mean quarterly) which means I't be looking at it at my next quarterly review, presumably in late March. If/when I do this, there will be many steps these steps have not yet started haunting my thoughts so I have't saved them to MLO, except for (as Lisa mentioned) a few notes like hiring a paver and checking if I need any permits. If I find myself spending time thinking through the steps, I'll open the reminder, create some preliminary work breakdown just to clear my mind, and file it back again. Which brings me to someday/never. To me, the important thing about someday/never is that these are things I totally can ignore for the time being. I never ever have to think to myself, is there something in that folder I have to take care of. I review the someday/never folder quarterly, and I decide whether I should be moving any tasks out into some other category like yardwork or financials. If I put something that was "not QUITE ready yet" into someday/never, I would have to start worrying about "is it ready yet" and checking it from time to time, which to me would rob the someday/never folder of its role and its value. Here's an example of what I do with not-quite-ready stuff. I sent a payment to an important vendor and I find myself thinking about whether it will arrive on time, get deposited, clear, etc. So I create a task in my inbox "did payment to xxx clear?" - I set a start date of 2 weeks because there's no point in checking this any earlier. This is super each to do: type <alt><s>2w<alt><1> - then I drag it to my Financials folder. This causes it to inherit the context <Financials from the folder. I tend to obsess about financials and spend too much time on them, so I manage this by confining my financials work to two times per week, Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. The <Financials context is open at those times and closed the rest of the week. So the task (and the folder) do not show up in my to-do list other than the two times per week that I do financials; it's Sunday morning now but the task is not there because the two weeks are nut up yet. The two weeks will be up a week from tomorrow; the task will appear the following Wednesday evening. If I don't get to it then, I will get it the following Sunday morning, two weeks from today. Sometimes there's more to do than fits into the time slot. My to-do list includes a sort (3rd level) of how long since the last time this entry was changed, oldest first. That way, If I can't get to everything I will get to the stuff that's been waiting longest. If I know I'm not getting to everything today and the item at the top of the list seems like it could wait, I just make some quick mod (like adding a blank into the note field) and it instantly drops to the bottom. The point is that there are a lot of ways of clearing stuff out of your to-do list so that the stuf you should do now shines through. It's best if the reason each item gets hidden has some relation to the reason you needn't do it now, because that minimizes the amount of time you need to spend thinking about the stuff that's currently hidden. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/5dffcf65-0d3b-4074-909b-e53a1524b91c%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
