[Lucas]

Here are two things I would try. If you don't want to try them, well, ok, but then I'm not sure why you would have posted on the forums to begin with.

First, if you have things that are supposed to happen on a specific date and time and not until then, e.g. calling particular clients, my first suggestion would be to put them in iCal / other calendar. I think the general consensus around here is that OF isn't really designed for these fixed appointment kind of things. iCalViewer is a great piece of software for keeping track of those upcoming appointments if you find iCal a hassle.

Alternatively, if you hate that idea and you really want everything in OF, then I would at least use the start dates in OF to keep an appointment out of your available list until the day it is supposed to happen. If there are other things that can be done before they are strictly speaking due, I think it can be a great aid to get them out of the way so that you will be less dragged away from the things that you feel like doing for the things that are hanging over your head. That's my advice, I think that it is at least rational, but if you don't want to try it, I certainly can't make you.

When it comes to prioritizing your projects, I agree that it is crazy talk to say that your business or your health is always going to be more important than your family. But, I would say that certain projects related to your business, your health, or your family are going to be priorities to you for a span of time. If you move that project/those projects to the top during your weekly reviews, then when you are in context mode and going through a particular context, you can say, "ok for this particular context, the first item on the list is the one I want to really make sure gets done, since I had already decided during my review that it was a priority; also the next one is really important, etc." Of course, at the time, you may decide that some of them should be skipped over for whatever reason. Not a big deal, since we already decided that they weren't immediately coming due. Maybe in your next review you'll move them down the list; or maybe you'll say they're still important and be at the top of a list to be handled.

I'll say the above paragraph a different way. For me, I felt like I got a much more confident feeling that everything on my to do list was under control when I took the approach that everything with an available status should be done. That is to say, if something has an available status, for the most part, I shouldn't be skipping over it; I'm in the proper context to get it done, I should just bite the bullet and do it. That is also to say, there are more available actions than there are hours in a particular day. You won't get through the list. So to figure out which actions should be done and which shouldn't, I decide which projects are generally more important during my weekly reviews, I put them in that order; then, when deciding what to do, I pick among the actions that are at the top of the screen, so that I have seven or ten actions that are most important to pick from instead of fifty that are all over the place. Of course, if you have time constraints, you might use the estimated time filter to limit your choices to those that would fit in the time that you have available. Again, this is just my answer to the question that you posed and which I assumed that you wanted an answer to.