Workflow problem: How do I distinguish "do this week" tasks from has appeared from my Tickler List?

[John . Smith]

Hello 

I just got an insight. 

First a little background: On my system, if a task is Active in MLO it means "do this week".

I use the Active view and move the Start Dates into the future (using keyboard hotkeys), so that I don't even see them for [X] days. This is my "Tickler List" in GTD speak.

Then at the start of each day, I look at all my Active tasks and give a Star to any task that is "do today".

So far so good.

However my insight is: Just because a task has become visible does not necessarily mean that it is "do this week".  What it really means is: "consider doing this week"!   i.e. In effect "Review this week"... but no, the decision to actually "do it this week" has not yet been taken!

So what has been happening is that my "do this week" lists of tasks keep getting cluttered up with stuff that I had only kicked into the future, but which I have not YET decided to actually do this week - if at all!  

And being a v slow reader, this has been leading to clutter and overwhelm.

BACKGROUND
At present I am using a Context-tag to flag up stuff that is on my "Do Someday/Maybe" list. And on most of my views I remove these from view (using an Advanced filter). 

And because I have quite so many tasks in this "Someday/Maybe" list, I also have a "Do Soon" Context-tag, that also removes tasks from my views. "Do Soon" is something that I keep fairly small in number, and which I will review during the week when I have a bit of slack time. Whereas "Do Someday/Maybe" only gets reviewed once per week, sometimes once per two weeks. For truly long-terms stuff I have an Archive folder where I dump stuff for reviewing in 6+ months, rather than actually deleting it. 

But I am now wondering how to distinguish "actually do this week" tasks from tasks that have merely appeared from my Tickler List. 

Do I really to assign a "This_Week" context to each task I'm going to execute?

Any thoughts?

J

 

[Trevor Peck]

TL;DR: I use the "review" function to handle this issue, with all tasks that are not "This week" in a branch hidden from the to-do list..

I made a view that shows every task that does not have a review date. I made a daily recurring task to check that view and assign review dates and/or intervals as appropriate until the view is empty. (I suspect most people would be happy doing this weekly, but I'm working on a major project with very little knowledge of how to do it, so my plans change OFTEN.)

Now every task has a review date and (likely) interval. Many tasks do not need to be reviewed (e.g. subtasks of a project), so their interval gets set to 520 weeks. (This is because when I click to select "years" while editing task properties, it disappears from this view and I can no longer mark it reviewed, and 520 weeks seems like long enough.)

 This way, I can put every Someday / Maybe task in the same folder, which is hidden from the to-do list, and I am reminded often of the important ones and less often for the not-so important ones. When I want to select one to be performed this week, I just move it to "Active", no date necessary.

 I schedule ten minutes for each day's review, but in practice it seldom takes more than a minute or two, even though I sometimes have 50 or more tasks to glance at. Going through the inbox does take longer using this method, but taking longer to process inbox tasks was one of the prices I decided I was willing to pay when I started using GTD, so it works for me.

 I am currently trying out using this for repeat tasks with long intervals, like semi-annual or longer. This is because often those tasks are important but the date is very flexible. I can set the review interval to something short, like daily or weekly, and change the review date to six months out. This lets me schedule these tasks when they fit in, and then adjust the review date for next time once I complete them. I can also date them if I wish, with a recurring date, and if I ever mark one completed without adjusting the review date it shows up soon to remind me to fix that. I'm not sure how I like this yet and I probably won't know for, you know, six months or so. ;-)

 - Trevor.

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[Darryl Brooks]

I just set up a similar approach as Trevor. At this point, all of my tasks are subtasks of a folder based on functional area, but that isn't relevant to this solution. Under every folder is a sub-folder with the following traits:

Name: Someday

Folder checked

Hide Branch checked

Review set to one month.

Everything that is something I don't want to forget, but am not ready to get to now, or even schedule goes into one of these folders. 
Then I set up a Someday view that shows every task in a folder named Someday, which brings all of these together. I am waffling between whether I want this to be a flat file or hierarchical. The advantage to putting these in separate folders under each high level folder, is I have a choice later to see the outline view or flatten it.