[BrandonY]

The GTD book gets into this very directly. It talks a lot about the principal borrowed from martial arts of having a "mind like water." When a pebble disturbs the water, the water responds instantly with exactly the right amount of force and then returns to stillness. GTD is big on the idea of responding to emails, ideas, projects, new work items, etc, with exactly the right amount of response and then letting the problem slip out of your mind once you're confident that the thing to be done is filed and therefore will get done.

The trick to making the whole thing work is that you need to have confidence that, once something is on the list, it will get done. That's what allows you to stop fretting about the stuff on the list. But to get that confidence, you need to regularly do the stuff on the list.