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Try it! Life is too short to live by a very long list of not so important stuff to dos.

Each of my to-do lists is ordered by priority. New to-do items are usually added on top of the list, but when I come back to the list I will move things around based on what’s the most pressing. This means I often end up with a pile of low priority items sitting at the bottom of my lists. I am aware of them and can trim them if required. This system is not as binary and definitive as real GTD, but it works for me.

Prior to the rise of GTD, there was a productivity system I attended training for call Mission Control (they’re still around – http://www.missioncontrol.com). One of the founding principals of their system is that in this day and age, we have too much stuff to do or handle. You cannot get it all done – end of story. Until you accept and admit this, it will be a key source of stress in your life.

Their system is fairly simple and has many parallels to GTD. Capture everything that comes into your life that you have to do or handle. Do this with only one capture tool (the founder was very found of digital voice recorders.) With the rise of email, they allowed you to add your email inbox as a capture tool. In GTD – this corresponds directly to the –œinbox–.

Once a day, you empty your capture tool. I seem to remember they allowed the same as GTD where if a task was only going to take two minutes or less, to do it immediately. Other wise, process until there is nothing left in your capture tool. After you are rolling, this should take more than 15mins.

This is where the system diverges from GTD. As you process your capture tool (inbox) things end up in one of three places. Stuff you are going to do, need a –œnow– scheduled for them. A –œnow– is the point in time when you would say, –œI–™m doing this now.– In practice, this meant scheduling a task on your calendar as opposed to just throwing it on an ever growing to do list. If there is no room on your calendar, then you don–™t have time to do it. That is where the next two lists come in.

The –œnot doing now– list is stuff you are not doing at any point in the future. This was always a bit nebulous for me, but typically was where my –œwaiting for follow-up– stuff went. I wasn–™t doing it because something external prevented me from scheduling it, so there was no –œnow– in the future.

Finally, there was the –œnever doing now– list. This is where the stuff you consciously said, –œI–™m never going to do this– went. There was something very liberating about having this list. You got the task out of your head, and it got handled. Today, this is what I use the –œSomeday/Maybe– list for.

Ultimately for me, the Mission Control system caved under the weight of the “now” list which had you scheduling every task on a calendar as to when you were going to do it. Well this is very helpful in quickly coming to the realization of “I want to do this, but there is no point in the foreseeable future that I have time to do it” it became tedious to maintain, especially went I–™d have a lot of tasks that I didn–™t know how long they were going to take.

Today, when I stick to GTD (which admittedly I’ve fallen off the wagon recently), I’m honest with what I will and will not have time to do in my weekly review, and move tasks and even whole projects to the “Someday/Maybe” list.