[Chris]

I used to assign due dates to everything and had the exact same experience. So I stopped. I don't use start dates though. What I did instead was to really start using the review feature. I have a "Daily Review" item that repeats every day, and a "Review Today" perspective for project mode that groups and sorts by next review date. Then I just make sure that I have a repeating review date set for all projects, usually at one or two week intervals.