[Gardener2]

I sort of did this a while ago. I had a huge tangled mess of items that I was unlikely to do any time soon and unlikely to even organize any time soon.

So I created several "task basket" projects and marked them On Hold, and dragged more than half of my tasks into them. I had several Task Baskets because there was some slight organization present and I wanted to retain it. As it turns out, it would have been just as well to create a single Task Basket.

Then, in my newly thinned-out system, I created an item "Process ten task basket items into system" and made it repeat every three days.

You could do the same thing with everything in OmniFocus. If I were doing this, I would:

- Make a single "Old Stuff" folder and drag everything from the Projects view into it.
- Rename every single context that's currently in use. For example, "Coding" would be "Old Stuff Coding".
- Set every single context to On Hold.
- Put all those contexts into a single "Old Stuff Contexts" context folder.
- Now that the whole old tangle is hidden, start over. The "On Hold" status and the single folders should make the old stuff relatively easy to ignore in your Perspectives.
- In the new stuff, add a repeating item to do a modest amount of processing of Old Stuff. Fifteen minutes every two days, five items a day, whatever. Process items thoroughly to ensure that you don't get bad stuff into the new system - if you don't know what to do with an item, just pass it by and process something else.

Now, the reprocessing may be a waste of time, but at least you have a relatively clean system while you're at it.

Gardener