Tangentially,
> I have over 30,000 tasks in my Org Mode overall. 23,000 of them are TODOs. Several thousand of them are still currently open. I'm never gonna see them all. Even if I wanted to, I'm never gonna see them all.
Now pretend that I cut and cut but can't bring myself to reduce x.txt to less than, say, 50 items, every one essential to complete by today. What do I do then? I copy x.txt to y.txt, and reduce x.txt to just what I plan to do for the next 4 hours. If that's still too long, I copy y.txt to z.txt, x.txt to y.txt, and reduce x.txt again. You could always start lower in the alphabet (a.txt) if you want more "space".
You get the idea. The point is, with text files, if it's got too much in it, create a backup version of that file and cut it down to size. Repeat as necessary until your todo list is manageably long.
If the approach is to let low priority items roll over, that just seems like a recipe for dropping the ball.
Are people getting through 133 items in a day? That's 216 seconds per item.
As someone who has compulsively accumulated lengthy to-do lists and buckled beneath the phantom of hopes and intentions of varying importance and ambition I find it enlightening that the possibility of completing a task other than those that are important enough to not have to write down to begin with can be measured by their meaningfulness and address according to this measure.
I gather that the .0050% of information that I consume daily is what is of the greatest priority and the remaining 99.995% is synthesized and iterated over the next day until it reemerges as something important. I suspect that Wiegley completes on average about 5 important things each day. This sounds like a solid baseline.
Maybe the 133 items are 120 items of one minute work each, and the rest are conditional or optional task you will not do that day.
Then stop managing them with fancy computers and just do them.
This is to say, if you don't keep on top of current work, the agenda view quickly turns into an ever growing wall of shame.
I have a pretty weird love-hate relationship with it because of that.
When "something" comes up, it's not always clear to me whether it's urgent or not, important or not. Getting it out into a list frees my mental capacity.
For example, I got a reminder to renew my passport yesterday. Not urgent, but important. Goes onto a list. I'll eventually prioritize and schedule it in my weekly review.
The key (for me) it aggressively devote attention to pruning these lists.
Those few "active" items and some more "standby" items are easy to list and read by themselves, but unexpanded, they're also non-actionable. And what I learned is, trying to expand even a few of them more than one level down quickly becomes overwhelming, and creates big overhead - as I work on one thing, the task breakdowns for the rest go stale, requiring additional effort to fix them. It surprised me just how fast this happens (and how quickly it leads me to stop looking at my own plans).
Related and perhaps extreme example that taught me much is when I took a medium-sized ticket that seemed perfectly doable in two to three work-weeks, and attempted to break it down all the way to actionable TODOs no larger than 2 to 4 hours worth of work. I wanted to see if this would streamline my work and allow me to make a more precise time estimate for the whole ticket.
I probably spent a day or two on the breakdown itself, complete with estimates and dependency links for every item - starting Z requires X and Y to be done, Y is done when A and B are done, etc. Standard project management stuff - lets you compute critical path and prioritize accordingly, and even draw a Gantt chart. My 3-week project ended up having some 150 tasks in it. Initially it looked great, but just a day or two into actual work, I found myself redoing large parts of the breakdown. Every two or three ticked-off tasks, the newly-gained knowledge made it apparent some task dependencies were to too strict, or entirely unnecessary. Large subtrees had to be split, shifted around or deleted, or had to have their estimates adjusted, all while new actionable tasks had to be added (and broken down). And that doesn't even includes the time spent readjusting the list after being pre-empted by some unrelated, critical-priority tasks.
All that planning quickly became a huge maintenance overhead. I only ever started making progress on the project itself when I stopped paying attention to my lists. That experience has taught me to stop breakdowns much earlier, and to stop eagerly breaking everything down to the same level - however good estimates I got this way, they weren't even needed for anything, and at the same time, they were constantly invalidated by added re-planning overhead.
These days, I don't break down work ahead of time beyond what's apparent and useful at the moment. I went from ahead-of-time to just-in-time.
Another factor is, it seems I'm really bad at the whole separation of planning and execution stages. My mind doesn't work that way, and can't stay in "execute this list one item at a time" mode for very long.
Makes no sense to torture yourself over something you can literally change tomorrow.
Also, "something you can literally change tomorrow" is very much wrong, for the usual obvious reasons: I couldn't possibly afford a 90% salary cut, and neither could my family. Given standard life choices, past a certain age your career becomes a shackle.
Of course there are significant tradeoffs to be made, since there are infinitely many potential tradeoffs in life.
The term of art for this strategy is "size to the horizon". Imagine you're looking across an open plain. The trees and rocks closer to you are bigger and you can make out more detail. The ones further away are still abstract.
You have to know exactly what to do with the things right in front of you, but you have to keep only a general awareness of that which is distant.
I was wondering what an action-adventure villain was doing in the dictionary
> Ganot
Oh, that sounds more like a real person.
Perhaps my locating of the quote is redeeming
https://archive.org/details/elementreatisephys00ganorich/pag....
For a second I misread it as Gowron, and my mind started replaying the quote above in an angry Klingon voice.