[SpiralOcean]

Here is a great article on LifeCleaver.

One of the suggestions at the bottom of the article talks about keeping track of killed projects so you don't go back and add it again.

One brilliant point about OmniFocus is it does just that!
When you drop a project, it stays in the list.
Brilliant.

Here is the link:
http://www.lifeclever.com/cull-your-...st-ruthlessly/

And the article:

I came to a realization yesterday. It’s something I’d understood on one level or another for a long time, but this was the first time I’d articulated in a way that really sank in:

I create new tasks faster than I could ever accomplish them.

Coming to this realization gave me a tremendous sense of freedom. I imagine other addicts feel the same way when they hit rock bottom and realize it can only go up from here.

Face It: You Are Your Own Worst Manager

Imagine a boss who doesn’t do any work himself. He just sits at home all day thinking of what you’re doing wrong, what you should be doing next, and giving you new projects and tasks constantly without any thought to how busy you already are and how much you have left to do. This boss has no concern for your personal life, couldn’t care less whether you have enough time to spend with your loved ones or simply play and relax. As far as your boss is concerned, your a lazy good-for-nothing who needs to be constantly whipped into shape.

That boss is inside you. It’s the part of your brain that worries in the most literal sense of the word, worrying away at your problems like a wolf gnawing at a wound. You can go to the movies or have a drink with a friend, but if there’s the slightest friction in your life, your brain is in the back there trying to find a solution. When a potential solution appears, a new task gets added to the notepad and processed into your system.

Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

The problem is, we GTD-ers get a little too good at capture. Everybody has those moments where they think “Wouldn’t it be great if I did X?” But most people don’t write each of those ideas down immediately, process them, and then attack them methodically. They usually put them aside and go on with their day; only the most pressing ideas (i.e. the solutions to problems that are actually problems) keep pinging them until they finally put a solution in action. People who embrace GTD are generally very smart people who are frustrated by seeing good ideas go to waste. Personal progress is very satisfying, so we use a methodology that helps us efficiently capture each idea and see it through.

But the strength of GTD is also its greatest weakness. We get so good at capturing and executing tasks that we get sloppy. We throw everything into the machine. Where most people rely on inertia and friction to filter out the stuff that doesn’t really need to get done—saving their sanity—we reduce those obstacles until our task-accomplishing runs up against the one limitation that GTD can do nothing about: Time.

(If you’ve ever looked around you at people who don’t use GTD, and marveled at the fact that they have jobs, pay taxes, and in general get through life just fine, and also have time for hobbies, while you feel like you’re doing tasks every minute of every day and never seem to catch up, you know what I’m talking about here.)

We use all our time up, because there’s no opposite force (beyond divorce, anxiety attacks, heart problems, and so on) forcing us to save enough of our time for ourselves. Like smoking, unchecked GTD is a habit that feels good in the present, with long-term health consequences.

Eliminate Productivity Cruft

According to Wikipedia, “cruft” is a term used by computer programmers to refer to code that duplicates “code elsewhere in the system, is unnecessarily complicated, is a poor solution to the problem it solves, is left over from a previous change, etc.” In his wonderful little book, In the Beginning…was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson talks about how operating systems become increasingly weighed down by cruft as the software gets more and more bloated with each new feature.

Adding capabilities to a system is great, but if there’s no simultaneous, regular process for simplifying and reducing it at the same time, it will eventually spiral out of control and collapse under its own weight. This is one of the main reasons Apple decided to start from scratch, so to speak, with OS X. To make a fast, modern operating system, they had to sacrifice backward compatibility and begin from square one. It was a painful transition, but the result was a marvelous piece of uncrufty software.

Purging Isn’t Enough; Hire Yourself an Agent

OK, so your “worst boss” is the part of your brain that’s been trained to capture every thought and idea and turn it into action, building a pile of tasks far faster than the rest of you can accomplish them. Every once in a while, I get totally fed up and strung out and, in a fit of pique, cull my task list ruthlessly.

A good task purge makes me feel better right away, but within a day or two I start coming up with new tasks and projects at an even faster rate. “With all that free space on my task list, I must have a lot of time to spare!” Wrong.

The trick is to automate the task removal process, too. Imagine an agent, someone who’s in it for you, who comes into your office and yells at your boss and says “No, you don’t need him to do these four tasks. Life will go on. He needs to sleep. He needs to play. He needs to walk his dog. Forget the someday/maybe list, just get rid of it.”

Make this step an essential part of your Weekly Review, and put it at the end of the process, because an empty list is a temptation to add even more tasks.

The Rejected Task Killfile

Keep track of the tasks you’ve removed in a killfile, so that you don’t keep adding them. For instance, you might keep telling yourself you need to organize all the photos in your iPhoto database according to some new, better scheme. But during your weekly task cull, you decide it just isn’t worth it: you can find what you need and three hours fussing in there just isn’t necessary.

Problem is, if you don’t record the fact that you at one point decided against doing that task, your brain will keep reminding you, and you may even add it back to your list, only to remove it the following week. So keep track of all the tasks you’ve at one point decided simply weren’t worth the effort, and respect your own past choices. Sometimes, even the best of us have weak moments.

The fact is, we often add tasks to our lists as a way to stave off anxiety. The first sign I’m really anxious is that I start adding new tasks left and right. Guard for that behavior.

At the end of your weekly review, go through each and every task on your list with the following questions in mind: What will happen if I don’t do this? Chances are, nothing much.

I’m doing my weekly task cull now. Wish me luck. If you have success with this, let me know in the comments.