[wilsonng]

My life is already full of tasks already. So I usually create a new project in my Someday/Maybe folder and automatically set the status to "on hold". There is no sense in adding to a plate that is already full.

Many new projects are important but not urgent and should be placed on hold until your daily/weekly review can be executed. When I do my weekly review, I am more calm and can decide what currently active projects I can shuffle back to on hold (someday/maybe) and which "on hold" projects to activate.

I believe life is already full enough. We sometimes find our lives full of so many "active" projects which can overload our GTD system.

Perhaps you are working in the projects perspective and just see a long list of all your projects? Use the projects perspective to do your planning and getting an overall sense of your projects.

Switch to Context mode to see what next actions are available for each of your projects. Viewing next actions in context mode will eliminate all other actions that are not available because it either has a future start date or the action cannot be started until the preceding next action has been accomplished.

In my life, I usually have 5-8 active projects and everything else is "on hold."

During the weekly review, I'll notice that if a project has stalled and make a decision on my list of currently active projects. I may have lost interest and I'll put it on the backburner once again for a future date by placing it on hold. Then I'll activate another project that has gotten my interest once again. Or I may have issues with the current active project and will have to rethink the next actions or just eliminate the project.

I often shuffle projects back and forth. There are a couple of projects that I will keep active. These are my Big Rock projects. Everything else becomes the Small Rock projects.

After a while, you'll get a sense of what to activate and what to place on hold.

The secret is in doing the weekly review on a consistent basis. This helps you to put stalled projects back to on hold so you no longer see it in Context Mode. At the same time, you'll be engaged in looking at some on hold projects and determining which ones you really want to keep and which ones to eliminate.