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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

IMHO GTD-based approaches are not optimal for knowledge workers cause they don't limit work-in-progress, and this ends up being overwhelming.

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I'm not sure I understand your comment (I don't know what you mean by "limit work-in-progress") but one of the principles is to be explicit and formal about all the projects you've got going, as opposed to having fuzzy ideas about an unlimited number of potential projects in your head. When you track all of these projects, you adopt a more realistic approach, and you think more carefully about whether or not to start one.

I mean GTD got lots of things right (have an inbox, split tasks/tasks with deadlines/events), but it is missing the WIP limit from kanban which is very important.

I am not sure if I get you right, but what I have a problem with is that to-do list are, well, lists of deadlines. There is no representation of task being "in progress". This way, if you don't groom your list on a daily basis, you may end up having dozen of deadlines to face one day.

Yes, most todo apps today are not friendly to dateless tasks, and they conflate start / hide-until date with due date, which should be kept separate. I call this problem 'due date pollution'.

I think a user must be able to postpone a task without assigning a due date to it. I'm working on a todo app that will implement separate hide-until and due dates.

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