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Comment by specproc | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that's ever worked is a piece of paper and a pen. Never really look back more than a week.

Not sophisticated, but it moves me forward.

Realizing graveyard of good intentions is not that valuable is one of the most important things that we have to learn. Best to just cut it and work on what is ahead.

Totally agree — learning to prune the “good intentions” pile is a real productivity upgrade. Out of curiosity: do you have a simple rule for what you cut (age-based, relevance to current projects, or “if it didn’t turn into action, delete”)?

Last 2 or 3 years I do end of the year pruning.

Stuff that is relevant for things I am currently busy with are recent so like last couple weeks. Stuff that I don’t remember touching in those weeks gets deleted.

That’s a great pruning heuristic. Is this mostly about notes/links, or do you apply the same rule to other inputs too (email, chat threads, bookmarked posts, PDFs, repos, etc.)?

For the non-note stuff, do you have a “recently touched” equivalent, or do you rely on different rules (e.g. archiving/search for email, starred threads for chat, etc.)?

Totally get it — paper forces focus and has near-zero overhead. Out of curiosity, is the “one-week horizon” a deliberate constraint to avoid backlog guilt, or just what naturally works for you?

Just what "works" for me, I guess.

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