Two years of dutiful capture and the list now has 240 things in it. Some are from a job I left. Opening the app produces a physical flinch, so I've been working off sticky notes on my monitor instead, which works fine and makes me feel like a fraud. I don't want to start over and lose the genuinely useful stuff buried in there, but I also can't face reading 240 items.
Declare bankruptcy, but do it as an archive rather than a delete so the fear goes away.
Make one list called Archive 2024 and move all 240 into it in a single operation. Don't read them. Your working list is now empty.
Then spend fifteen minutes writing down what you're actually going to do in the next two weeks, from memory. Whatever you can recall unprompted is, almost by definition, the stuff that matters. Anything you forgot but which is genuinely important will resurface on its own within a fortnight, because someone will ask about it.
The archive is your safety net. In six months you will have opened it approximately once, and you'll notice that almost nothing in there needed doing. That realisation is worth more than the 240 items.
Did the archive move and wrote nineteen things from memory. Nineteen. Out of two hundred and forty.
That ratio is very consistent. Which also tells you the capture habit isn't the problem, the not-deleting habit is.
Small thing, but delete the ones from the old job today, before anything else. Seeing tasks from a life you don't live any more is a surprisingly heavy tax every time you open the app.
One rule I added that fixed this permanently: every task gets a review date, and anything that goes past its date three times gets deleted rather than rescheduled. If I've deferred it three times, I'm not going to do it, and pretending otherwise is what makes lists rot.
Also worth noticing that the sticky notes are working. That's not fraud, that's data. They work because there are six of them, they're visible without an action, and they get thrown away. Whatever you build next should have those three properties.
Thrown away is the underrated one. Digital lists have no equivalent of the satisfying physical bin and things linger for years as a result.
@spreadsheet_tabs · 2mo ago · 2 replies
The structural fix so it doesn't rebuild: separate the list of things you're doing from the list of things you might do. Two lists, hard boundary. The active one is allowed a maximum of around ten items and you're not permitted to add an eleventh without removing one. Everything else lives in someday, which you skim once a month and mostly delete from.
A list you flinch at is a list that has stopped distinguishing between commitments and ideas.
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@cold_storage_kim · 2mo ago
The hard cap is the part that works. Without a number it's just a preference and it drifts back to 240 in a year.
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