More on GTD priorities: The unsorted action list.

One of the great things about GTD is that it involves an intuitive approach to priorities. If you set up your lists well in advance, or so the thinking goes, you will be able to decide in the moment what you should do next.

But as many of us find out the lists sometimes get too long, making it difficult to choose what to do.

Recently, one thing I've found helpful is to stockpile all my current actions in one place (unsorted), rather than in contexts. This list (actually a big pile of index cards) is my baseline. At the end of the day, when I process my inbox, I add new next actions to this great big stockpile. If I want to, I review this pile to see if anything should be deferred or moved to someday maybe (which is easy enough to do since I'm using index cards).

Why do I do this? For a long time, I used context lists as the main repository for my actions. The problem was that I couldn't prioritize without looking through all of my contexts first. And I sometimes forgot to look at all of my context lists, meaning that some urgent actions were missed. I felt that contexts weren't giving me a clear enough picture of what I needed to do on any particular day. And by the end of the day, it was a headache to take stock of where I stood on various projects, since different components were on separate lists. For whatever reason, I found conventional GTD context lists difficult to deal with. With stuff scattered over a bunch of lists, I couldn't visualize my work as a whole, which meant that I ended up working on the wrong things at the wrong time.

By keeping all my actions together, I make it easy to review everything on my plate first thing in the morning. Depending on time, energy, and deadlines, I have one of two options. I can either sort cards into contexts (which is what I do most days) or I can pull out a smaller set of actions that I want to make sure I get done that day. Or I can use some combination of the two approaches, creating a pile of urgent tasks and a separate pile sorted by context. Usually, I leave many less urgent actions sitting in the mega-pile, because too many next actions leave me feeling confused and distracted.