[Gardener]

> I guess i'm simply wondering how in depth people make their
> systems to be because I put everything in there and at the end of
> my WR I feel great, but the list is incredibly long when it comes
> time to look at my contexts and the truth is I just end up not
> looking at my list again till the next WR.

I'd say that if you want to do it, and it's not an unbreakable unforgettable habit ("Remember to put on shoes before going out in the rain.") put it in there.

That doesn't mean that it's not going to land in Someday/Maybe. If you want to form a habit of writing in your journal, and sometimes you forget, then I'd say that, "Form habit of writing in journal daily" is a project. You may or may not have time for that project right now, so you may tuck it into Someday/Maybe and, for now, go on with a daily custom of sometimes remembering, sometimes forgetting.

Since you're not looking at your lists until the next review, then I'd say that it would be appropriate to do extensive and ruthless cutting, moving perhaps nine out of ten, nineteen out of twenty, even ninety-nine out of a hundred, items into Someday/Maybe. In fact, you might want to move _everything_ to Someday/Maybe and then select a minimal number of items to move back.

An added strategy could be to move some items out of your lists and into checklists. For example, if you have a dozen items like "remember to unload dishwasher before dinner" and "remember to spray mildew spray on shower stall" and so on, you could create a single project, "Improve daily household maintenance habits". Then you could create a daily checklist containing those dozen items, print thirty of them, and for a month you could work and check off that checklist every evening. (Or of course the checklist could be electronic.) Your GTD system would include one repeating item "Complete household maintenance checklist" rather than including the dozen items.

I also move similar items into lists. (Single-action lists where every item has an On Hold context of Info.) So I don't have an action or project "Read Susan Khalje's Couture book". I have a list "Things to Read" and I have an Action, repeating weekly, "Consider reading an item from Things to Read." That compresses what could be dozens or hundreds of items down to one. If I do choose that book and I decide that I want to make a full-fledged project of it, testing the sewing techniques and so on, only when I'm ready to start do I expand it to that project.

Similar lists could include Things to Learn, Purchases to Research, Garden Plantings to Plan, stuff like that. If I have thoughts about an item on one of these lists before I'm ready to do anything about it, I can add it to the note on the item.

And then there are Start Dates. If I know I'm not going to work on something this week, but I do want it to pop up and remind me rather than hibernating in Someday/Maybe and waiting for me to come find it, I'll give it a Start Date a week or a month or three months in the future. (And I'll configure my Perspectives to show only items with non-future Start Dates.)

All of these strategies are intended to leave me with no more than ten to forty current actionable actions in my perspectives. With that small a list, I feel comfortable really using it to guide my work through the week.

Gardener