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Comment by manholio | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like you are an overachiever. The big implicit assumption of GTD is that, while it makes you more productive, there is still a limit on how much you can take on. Workload is not specifically addressed, but implicitly the overflow will go to the Someday folder.

I think the answer to this problem is not any productivity trick, but to aim for exponential growth of your business, career, etc. so that Delegate becomes the primary workhorse instead of Next Actions. Prioritize actions you perform and projects you start so that they are conducive to a long term self-sustaining increase in your productivity. And accept that you may have limited success/luck in unleashing the exponential and that some projects will forever stay out of your linear reach.

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> Sounds like you are an overachiever.

Not at all. I'm not trying to achieve all, or even most of those things. I know I won't even be able to do a tenth of them.

One of the core ideas behind GTD is to get these things out of the mind and into a trustworthy system. My Someday/Maybe list is huge because I get it out of my mind and put it somewhere. How many of them I get to do in my life is not at all a concern I have.

> Prioritize actions you perform and projects you start so that they are conducive to a long a self-sustaining increase in your productivity.

When your list is hundreds of items long, and GTD tells you to prioritize every week, that is unsustainable.

For my work GTD, things are simpler. The scope is limited, and there's not attachment to any project. The job dictates most of what needs to be done and it makes prioritizing almost trivial. It's the GTD for the non-work stuff that explodes.

> When your list is hundreds of items long, and GTD tells you to prioritize every week, that is unsustainable.

One of the nice things about GTD is that you make everything explicit. It quickly becomes obvious when you have too many active projects, nudging you to decide which project are really worth doing. The same goes for having too many next actions.

> It's the GTD for the non-work stuff that explodes.

Great if you're actually getting all that non-work stuff done, but I just can't imagine you're doing hundreds of non-work items each week.

> It quickly becomes obvious when you have too many active projects

The issue I'm discussing isn't the number of active projects, but the number of someday/maybe projects.

> Great if you're actually getting all that non-work stuff done, but I just can't imagine you're doing hundreds of non-work items each week.

See paragraph above.

The issue I'm complaining about is that GTD tells you to review the Someday/Maybe list often (e.g. every week). I'm pointing out the infeasibility of that. Culling the Someday/Maybe list is fundamentally problematic in GTD, as the whole point is to get these ideas out of our head and into a list somewhere.

A simple (if impure) solution is to add a secondary "Someday/Maybe" list. Call it something like "Eventually/Remotely-Possible".

Limit your S/M list to a comfortable number of entries, and drop the ones that don't make the cut to E/RP. Review S/M regularly, review E/RP only when curious, or when one of the items becomes of renewed interest.

I'm an archivist by nature. I don't like to delete items. E/RP can grow to thousands of items, and that's OK. Occasionally one will be revived. The rest will be keep each other company.

I think the complaint isn't that one couldn't try different ways to manage the problem, it's that the system doesn't address it at all.

I don't see this as an issue.

I don't think I've ever met a system that fully addressed all requirements of all participants -- in any category of systems.

There's no pretense to divine scripture here. Adopt the good bits, avoid the dogma.

Yes, precisely. I've found solutions similar to the other commenters. My complaint is:

1. This is a common problem - I'm not unusual.

2. GTD's approach to this problem doesn't really work - hence everyone here listing how they solved it in a way that differs from GTD (i.e. not reviewing it weekly).

My strategy to handle a too-long someday/maybe list is to clarify how often I want to revisit the list. I have a list to review weekly, a separate list to review monthly, quarterly, etc. I have separate lists for someday/maybe date night ideas, vacation ideas, professional development ideas, and so forth.

Someday/maybe exists to get something out of my head and into a trusted place where I know I’ll see it again at an appropriate time. If I know that I only need to see something quarterly (or when planning a date night), I don’t need to revisit during every weekly review.

What I find is that, when I have more distance between reviews, it is easier to call the list organically. After a quarter, I haven’t thought about some of those items for months and I can easily say, “Actually, that doesn’t sound interesting any more.”

I don't agree. You're describing tickler items. If you make a decision that you should revisit the potential item in two months, it goes in the tickler for that time. Indeed, that's exactly why the tickler exists.

No, I'm describing Someday/Maybe. If you're not sure when or even if you'll do a project, it goes into Someday/Maybe, and you're supposed to review this list regularly.

Tickler file is for when you'd like to be reminded of something. So yes, if indecisive about a project, you can let it sit there. However, if you decide you won't do it any time in the near horizon, you move it out of tickler files and into Someday/Maybe.

The two are not mutually exclusive, of course. One could treat the Tickler file as equivalent to Someday/Maybe, but for me that would be horrible. I can't imagine having to deal with hundreds of items spread across only 43 folders.

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