Slow Productivity - where you work at your own pace, focusing on quality, - would be the antidote to burnout that we all need.
Do less!
I've definitely been feeling like I'm battling my todo list more than using it recently - but it's still the best system I've used to date. I just come to accept that anything that doesn't have an explicit priority is going to end up bumped off to next week, sometimes repeatedly.
> When it was a list with a dozen items, I had a tendency to start with the easy ones so that I could check something off, not the important one or two.
This is a really good point. You can still have a backlog of minor tasks, but they are not as important as the big rocks.