[tunesmith]

It's interesting to me that GTD has so many adherents - clearly there is a wide cross-section of people for whom it works well. I tried really hard for a while but ended up concluding I must be a different category of person. I experienced the following pain points:

- I got overwhelmed by what I was capturing

- Contexts weren't useful at all and only complicated the system

- I had far too many tasks on my list that made me feel guilty for never starting, no matter "when" I would schedule them

The sort of system that ended up helping me was an exhaustive exercise that helped me determine my lifelong values, and how they related to my priorities in terms of actions. Then I could identify my tasks - not as "oh gosh, I should do that too" impulses, but as actions that were actual logical implications driven from my values. I discovered that the large majority of my "guilt-driven" tasks were tasks that actually weren't connected to my values, or could be replaced by other tasks that were a better fit. And I almost never "capture" - I will review my values, and reason from there.

Overall, that worked better for me because then I had a system that gave me a built-in way to say no. From what I learned about GTD at the time, GTD doesn't have that.

[addicted]

Wouldn’t the clarify step involve such decision making? Whether or not you actually want to tackle the stuff you may have captured?

[tunesmith]

No, because the clarify step is applied to everything you capture. If your problem is that you're capturing too much, then it doesn't really help. It sort of assumes you're going to process what you captured someday.

[doitLP]

That sounds a good approach.

Mind sharing how you went about determining your life values?

I always envy those who seem to have a clear cut purpose.

[tunesmith]

There's a business term called MECE - mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. It's just a way to break things down. You can break one thing down into multiple other things, MECE-style. There might be a bunch of different ways to do that, you just pick one.

So for instance, I started with the statement, "I have a happy, fulfilling life." Then I tried to think of the 3-5 things that were each necessary and collectively sufficient, and without overlap, in order for that to feel like a true statement.

It breaks down in a somewhat predictable fashion from there. For me, there was health, financial security, social, purpose, etc.

Then for each of those, you do it again. Visually, I had the "fulfilling life" statement on top, branching down from there. So like an upside down pyramid. As you go down, the statements get more personalized and actionable.

Over the years I've found that the lower levels change more frequently than the upper levels. Like, staying up to date on a particular Anki deck used to feel necessary to justify the statement above it. Now it doesn't.

It's also pretty impossible to always keep the entire DAG up to date and perfectly reflecting all my priorities in my life. Life's too big. (Or maybe I just don't have the right UI/UX.) But doing it once gave a lot of perspective in terms of telling the difference between what's really important to me, and what I thought was important but really wasn't.

[mrkstu]

It’s pretty much the Covey-Franklin pyramid method.

https://youtu.be/E1nw46xcFno