[roel_v]

In GTD that is fixed through "contexts". E.g. you have a context "phone calls to make", and then next time you have time and are near a phone, you can start working on those tasks. Many todo apps have some sort of mechanism for that, or is this not what you mean since you seem to be familiar with GTD?

GTD has a lot of solutions for various types of todo list problems, but then again, you have to be a quite conscientious person to follow through on all of the details of it. At which point you probably have no problem with plain scribbles on some loose paper. My wife makes todo lists all the time (like, she's taking to someone and while she's talking she'll pull out some paper and write things down completely unrelated to the conversation, without skipping a beat) but she's very conscientious about actually doing those tasks, so she doesn't have a need for more complicated systems than small piles of papers with things that need to be done.

Whereas I make lists with breakdowns and several dimensions of categories and preferably according to a clearly defined, all-encompassing system, and it needs to work on all devices and include everything from what I need to buy for dinner tonight to my life goals, and then those notes become a job in themselves and I say fuck this and throw them all out and try the same thing again 6 months later. I'd much rather be like my wife.

[rtpg]

Yeah I'm aware of contexts, but I was thinking more of things like deferring until certain dates and also having task sequencing (so for example if I defer the first task in a sequence, it won't show me the next tasks, since they're not available).

> GTD has a lot of solutions for various types of todo list problems, but then again, you have to be a quite conscientious person to follow through on all of the details of it. At which point you probably have no problem with plain scribbles on some loose paper.

I kinda disagree with that. Like I agree that you need to be studious, but not to the level of not needing the organization. "Being able to orgainze a list of tasks" and "being able to hold a list of tasks in your head" or "being able to work off the list of tasks without it being organized" are different things on different axes.

I would also much rather be like you wife, but absent that I'll at least do a thing that I know is better than nothing. Sometimes the results get thrown out but nothing is zero effort.