Comment by xjtian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xjtian | Hacker News Reader

I think the rigidity of this system is its biggest drawback, as is the case with most productivity systems. For example, if I have two large projects that I need to get done and I only write down one, the other is going to keep nagging at me in the back of my head while I'm working and distract my focus. If I write both of them down, then I've deviated from the system, which in my experience means that by the end of the week, it'll just devolve into a vanilla to-do list grouped by the 'size' of tasks.

That's mainly why I switched to GTD for all of my to-do lists and projects. Because my inbox holds literally every task or to-do item that pops into my head during the day, I never have that distracting "am I forgetting something?" feeling during the day. I can process and sort my inbox whenever I have free time, and the flexibility in deciding which tasks should be made into projects, next actions, etc... means that the system always fits my schedule no matter how unpredictable or crazy it is, instead of me having to fit my schedule into the system.

If you only have two big things you need to get done, that is probably part of your problem. In that case, one of your todo's should probably be to subdivide one or both of them into smaller tasks.

One of my most effective ways of overcoming procrastination in particular is that when I don't want to do something, I force myself to at least spend two minutes splitting at least one task on my todo list into a few smaller tasks. Sooner or later I have enough really small, trivial tasks that it is easy to push through at least some of them.

Sometimes that ends up with stupid levels of details. But often it ends up revealing that part of the reason for procrastinating was that I didn't really know, but maybe had a nagging suspicion of, the level of complexity in a task...

Sometimes it's not so straightforward to split up large into many small tasks. A lot of the time these steps will depend on other unpredictable factors, which leads to a lot of backtracking and adjusting my to-do list down the road when I should be working.

I'm a fan of iteratively processing my projects, deciding just the next one or two steps every time I process my tasks. I find that if I let my to-do lists balloon in size, I have less motivation to actually clear it out. But that's just me. In the end it's all about making the right decision based on how you know your brain works.

I use my inbox as well, with heavy reliance on Boomerang to get stuff out of my sight until I'm ready to deal with it. Any other good inbox tools/hacks to recommend here?

So what do you use as your inbox?

I use an app called pocket informant on my phone. It's a nice all-in-one organizer that supports GTD-style tasks and syncs with my Google calendar.

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