[yucca]

Sounds like you are coming from a Franklin background (spent over 20 years there myself). You have a lot to unlearn, or at least I did when I implemented GTD. Try to purge the urge to prioritize tasks for now, and focus on getting a set of contexts that give you manageable "in the moment" task groupings. A key here is to leverage the duration field (time to do estimate), and create some custom Perspectives that exploit these values when in Context Mode.

I have views for Perspectives for tasks requiring less than 30 minutes, less than an hour, less than two hours and more than two hours. Create whatever makes sense for you. These Perspectives really help me focus on the doable given available time and context. From a GTD perspective, the only missing elements are energy (or creativity) level (next "tie breaker), and finally priority (when nothing else can determine what to do next).

Originally Posted by jkrytus

...and then (another question), lets say an item comes up on your tickler and you decide that you have too much on your plate today, but maybe in a couple days you'll have time. Do you simply change the start date? Or do you check it off (so you know you put it off once) and recreate it with a new date?

I use the Note feature to capture things like date created, times deferred, etc. if I'm worried that a task or project might need further consideration because I keep putting it off.