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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

The tendency is to fill up your task software with dozens of projects and tasks under each project. But the more you look at your projects and tasks every day for the next few weeks, it gets discouraging. It feels like a never-ending river of stress.

Two points on GTD that deal with this:

- Part of writing everything to down is to get it out of your head so you don't worry about it. If you have a bunch of big detailed lists and a lot to do, you don't have to get stressed out over it. That's frequently a hard choice for many to make, and the review process/50k foot view in GTD can help with this.

- GTD also encourages self assessment of what you feel up to doing. You need to be aware of what jobs you'd undertake given your amount of time and energy.

Treating GTD just as a way to empty the mind and organize your tasks is only a small part of the entire system. Half implementing it can definitely be more stressful than fully embracing some of the concepts.

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But how do you know what's on your plate today with GTD? Usually the prescribed approach is to go into a context (ie, @email or @phone) and start plugging away at the next actions from various projects that require you to be in that context. Great if you're in a straitforward task job like sales but not good for creativity and getting creative work done. It's too rigid and the focus is on the granular next actionable step. Sometimes tough problems require 5 hours of focused going at it. Correct me if I'm wrong but GTD never worked for me to promote that kind of focus. (btw, I wrote the OP)

Keeping an active inventory of your commitments (including a calendar for day to day items) allows for a couple of things:

1. Removing latent anxiety related to trying to keep track of all that needs to be done, which can in turn free one to focus on creative pursuits.

2. Making conscience decisions to defer certain projects and goals, which can also have quite a liberating effect.

I'm a GTD adherant, but the idea of just plugging away at next actions never clicked with me either. I do two things that seem to help:

1. I pick a couple of things each week that I need to focus on each week, and put them in a list I review every day. Generally, these are projects that I have on my project list, but that need some attention in a given week.

2. I maintain a daily todo list that is culled each morning from my master todo list. Each day I pre-pick a handful of things to do and put them on my list of tasks for the day. This act of preselecting my work isn't canonical GTD, but it works for me.

IMO GTD is a great starting point, but most people need to adapt it to their personal circumstances and working style.

Sounds good if you can really do the brain dump and then not worry about it. Some people make their massive lists and then spend half their day, every day, reviewing and reorganizing it.

Excessive reviewing can be from lack of trust in the system, or pure procrastination while appearing productive.

Nobody starts out trusting. You have to see it work before you can stop worrying.

The busywork aspect can be mitigated by allocating the daily review time and then refusing to fiddle with it. You might still procrastinate in other ways, but one less way is still good.

"To no longer worry about something requires worrying about it a lot first."

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