Overwhelmed by Next Actions

A Next Actions list for me has been unhelpful at best and overwhelming at worst. If I do the full system I have a ton of Next Actions on one list, and I become numb to it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gtd/comments/atkwnp/realizing_a_list_of_next_actions_just_does_not/

There are a lot of GTD practitioners who stopped because they are overwhelmed by the number of next action items. What made it worse is that, most of the GTD apps out there do not let you have an overview look of all the items in your different Next Actions lists.

Claritist surface this directly in the first page, and this helps a lot on the "Organize" stage, a stage where most people have forgotten that it needs to be done from time to time.

When I look at my Next Actions list, I am not supposed to do much thinking to do work, if I need to do much thinking, I will reorganize it. This is what David Allen talks about, when we are engaging, we are supposed to be the "dumb self". So I keep my all my next actions lists at less than 20 tasks, I find this to be a good number that I do not need to scroll much and think about which to pick.

A lot of people are too rigid towards thinking that the next actions list should be organized by context, priority, energy etc as recommended by the book. But if you dig deeper into the system, the way that it should be organized is, "when do you want to be reminded of this?".

So, let say you have 178 tasks in a next action, and you mentioned that you will become numb looking through it everyday to pick out what to do. Pick a number that you are comfortable with, I suggest 10-20, make a list of it, call it "Office Today", and during "processing/organizing/review", move the top 10-20 tasks that you want to be completed soonest into this list. Then, during your day to day, work off this list, until this list is empty, then you look at your other list, and start to move 10-20 items into this "Office Today" list again. Let your smart self do the processing/organizing/reviewing by thinking about priorities and which one you need to do, and that should only be done once, not every time you want to engage, then your dumb self who wants to engage can just look at the list and do.

Organizing is a big part of GTD, and the way to organize Next Actions is, WHEN do you want to be reminded of this, if you want to be reminded of the top 10-20 things today, and everyday, put them into a list.