Ship69 said:
Can you say more about that. Are you saying that you would actually prefer to have your distant things NOT broken down in to tasks, and NOT flagged, NOT categorized, NOT prioritized nor sorted in any way... and held in a single ASCII text file?! (Or maybe word document or spreadsheet)
That's almost it, yep. I do choose to break them up into large categories--Gardening, Sewing, and at work Widget Database Backlog, that sort of thing. So I suppose that's a level of sorting.
But they're not broken down as tasks, not sorted within their list, not categorized, not prioritized, not necessarily phrased into neat carefully named projects.
Ship69 said:
If so what happens to stuff that due to changing priorities goes from your Active/"On Deck" list to your Someday list... And then back?
It depends. Let's go with a scenario.
Let's say that Gardening Someday is a text file, and I review it quarterly. It contains, among many other things:
Blueberries?
In my late-winter review I see this and say, yes! I'm finally going to do this! I'm going to plant blueberries!
So I delete that line from Gardening Someday, and add a line to my reviewed-weekly, Gardening On Deck text file:
Blueberries
A few weeks later, during my weekly review of Gardening On Deck text file I decide, OK, time to actually work on that. So I delete the line from Gardening On Deck and add a project to my main lists:
Project: Grow blueberries.
Next Action: Research growing blueberries.
I do the research. I learn that I have to do a bunch of soil prep. I realize that I'm not going to do that before the coming spring. So I do two things (Edited to correct: Actually, three things.)
1) I delete the Grow Blueberries project.
2) I create a project in my main lists:
Project: Prepare for planting blueberries in spring 2017.
Next Action: Weed-whack the blueberry row.
3) I move Grow blueberries back to Gardening On Deck, as a line that says:
Grow blueberries (Prepping for Spring 2017)
I may also add a tickler for buying the actual blueberries--in my case, an action in my Miscellaneous Actions project with a Start Date of the appropriate time to buy them.
As the summer progresses, I'll look at the "prepare for..." project, and I'll realize around, oh, August, that it's just not happening. So I delete the project, and I open my Gardening Someday text file, and I add a line:
Blueberries?
And during the next weekly review, I come across the "Grow blueberries" line in Gardening On Deck, and I delete it. Someday when the "buy blueberries" tickler comes up, I'll delete it--or, more likely, I'll catch it during a weekly review and delete it befor ethen.
So the blueberries floated to the surface, bobbed around for a while, and then were submerged again. I did a little copy-pasting, but the benefit is that the six dozen other projects that I didn't even consider doing this year, have just been sleeping in Gardening Someday, only rarely taking up even an instant of my time.
Edited to add: If I have any doubt that I'll remember the soil prep issue, I might summarize what I've learned so far when I re-add the project to Gardening Someday:
Blueberries? (Spring planting, lots of soil prep ideally done a full year ahead, acidified soil could annoy neighboring plants.)
