[Jables]

Hey all,

I'm a relatively new GTD practitioner and OmniFocus user. I've been attempting to incorporate both systems into my daily life over the last month. It's certainly a work in progress but I'm hopeful that things will really take off once I'm able to really nail things down and dial it all in to my personal workflow. I'm still massaging and tweaking my project hierarchy and contexts to work for me (I have another thread I started awhile ago relating to this).

OmniFocus has been pretty helpful for me when it comes to smaller definable projects and tasks regarding personal responsibilities around the house and at work. I'm able to get these things off my mind and into OF which helps me not forget some small detail or responsibility that appeared sort of out of the blue.

However, the one area I'm having a really hard time working into my OF flow relates to High Level Goals, or what many of you GTD practitioners might refer to as "Someday/Maybe". When I initially setup GTD I had various high level goals that I added to my inbox. Many of these were personal goals or things that I'd like to accomplish. They were also very vague. I was able to more or less break them down into projects but I'm still not 100% happy with the results. I've tried hard to think about the "next actionable step" for each of them but sometimes even this is difficult. It's also difficult for me to wrap my head around what the end result really should be. I've read from different sources that people phrase their projects in a way that reads what the outcome of the project should be when it's finished. However, I fail to see how this applies to certain high level goals like "Learn Acoustic Guitar", which I find to be a project that has repeatable steps and no real "end" to it.

One of the other issues I've noticed when working with these high level goals is that I now have a list of all the things I would like to do with my free time (which is difficult to come by itself these days) and I start to get anxiety when looking at the list as a whole and considering, "Hey...this is all of the stuff I need to do in order to feel good about making any progress." This is in direct contrast of what GTD is all about but I'm not entirely sure where I went wrong.

One of my biggest personal problems deals with biting off more than I can chew whenever I get motivated to make a change in my life and start tackling my goals. I feel like I have a hard time selecting a single thing to focus on because part of me feels like I should be tackling everything at once (i.e. I should be making time to further each of my dream goals individually every day!). When I start to think about sitting down and prioritizing my goals, I get even more anxiety because I'm not sure where to start. If I wanted to knock them all out one by one, I wouldn't know the best way to approach that since, once again, some of them don't feel like they have a concrete end goal and should be factored into my everyday life. If I did decide to focus my efforts on learning guitar, when does that actually end? Also, when it comes time to shift my focus to another goal, what happens to my progress in playing guitar if I have to pick and choose what project gets my attention at any given time.

I'm really curious to hear how some of you have implemented your high level goals with GTD and made things work for you. Right now I feel like I've sort of hit a wall and I'm not sure which way to go.