I love this quote from Khe Hy:
One of the quiet stressors of modern task management is your aged tasks. The digital nature of our lives makes it easy to add something to the list – yet never act upon it. So here’s an easy antidote:
- Go into your task list and sort by incomplete, oldest first
- Look at the dates, yes there’s going to be some old stuff in there
- Create a rule (i.e. “If it’s been there for more than 3 months, delete”)
For me, there’s something that feels inherently bad about mass-deleting tasks (at least without looking at them), so I propose a slightly different approach at curing the symptom of task overwhelm. Instead, we should move these tasks to some form of a Someday Backlog. This will give us the benefits of “Out of sight, out of mind,” and then revisit that backlog with an appropriate frequency (Perhaps once a quarter or twice a year). It will feel good to see how many of those tasks you actually took care or are no longer relevant.