I find that as a todo list grows, it starts taking more and more effort to keep the tasks in that system relevant as my life situation changes. And the more irrelevant the system becomes, the less I’m inclined to spend the energy keeping it relevant, so a cycle forms. This graph roughly represents my current system’s slide into irrelevancy:
(Concretely, that’s a cumulative graph of the number of TaskWarrior urgency units completed.)
Getting Things Done addresses the issue by basically saying, “Yeah, it takes effort. Buckle down and do your weekly reviews and you’ll be fine.” I’ve done that in the past, but I don’t really feel like making my todo system as central a part of my life right now as GTD requires.
In the past, I’ve used a Moleskine day planner to create a purposefully leaky todo list, where I only focus on today’s list, and add tasks to today or a future date as it makes sense, letting today’s incomplete tasks pass into obscurity. That worked quite well for me for quite a while, and I still may revisit the system.
I’m hoping that AutoFocus will strike a happy medium, where it’s not particularly “leaky” like my day planner system was, but it may also require less effort to keep the system relevant. We’ll see how it goes. 