> IMHO, productivity tools should do more to help us stay on task: they should help with all aspects of cognition - from capturing ideas, to making plans, to making good on those plans. Fundamentally, productivity tools need to evolve to help us deal with the emotional components of 'getting unstuck'. It's the biggest problem, at least for me.

I've not seen any good solution (technological or otherwise) for meaningfully sorting all the information you've captured and prioritizing. There are plenty of ways to capture well (Org Mode!). In my experience, the more you capture, the worse things get. Until someone can come up with a scheme (need not be technological) to handle all that I've captured, /and/ in a manner that doesn't consume time, then you've got a solution.

One common approach is to timestamp things and just let anything beyond a certain date expire if you've not "handled" it. I honestly did not try it - probably should. The main concern would be that expired things will recur in my brain again and be captured later - over and over - a problem in and of itself.