Tom, glad this has helped you. It’s certainly helped clarify my own thinking, for better or worse. I’m actually having a free consult call this afternoon with one of the coaches to see if personal coaching is the right move for me, already forwarded her this thread and suggested that if she read it prior to our call it would give insights into where I'm at in the process. Will come back and post if I get new insights.
I realize my system wouldn’t work for a lot of people, maybe for most people. For me, I realized that I have two different modes of work. There are times when I'm just in the heat of it and I'm grinding out the stuff that I know I NEED to get done, and in that mode I just don’t have the time to go back and review context lists and re review my available NAs. When I tried doing that I just spun out, wasted energy and my productivity was terrible.
So each week during my review when I ‘schedule’ my workflow, when I get to that date I know what my plan is, and the way I represent tasks visually tells me whether it’s something I HAVE to get done that day or something I'd LIKE to get done that day. One thing I think is key, which is something I heard David say on a podcast (and I mentioned above) is that I give myself full permission to reschedule tasks that can be rescheduled if that needs to happen. I don’t view the due date as a fire alarm, but I view my “due today” list as almost a context to itself. And re the mechanics of it, rescheduling a task is super easy. I can reschedule 5 tasks in about 10-15 seconds, so it’s just not a big deal.
Then my other mode of work is when I'm not grinding in the heat of the workday and I can step back and say “OK, I've got some discretionary time here to advance some of my projects, let’s review my contexts and pick out what feels like it’s what should move forward right now.”
I know it’s kind of a schizoid approach, but my work environment is a little schizoid, so there you have it.