I love the point you make about addressing something early if you feel negative about it.

I think the point with any system is the habit of checking and reviewing it every day. You can have the best system in the world but if you don’t check it regularly, it will fail.

To me, one of the biggest lessons from GTD is to separate the inbox from the to-do list. It’s easy to have your inbox pile up with stuff that you need to do, and then you start going numb to it.

Instead, it’s pretty powerful to separate processing (determining what you’re going to do about some input in your life) from actual doing. Having an empty inbox doesn’t mean that your to-do list is empty, just that you’ve made a decision about the next action for the things that have come into your life.

With that, I’m off to transform my piled-up inbox into a set of next actions…

There are some places where pruning is problematic, however. The main obstacle, for me, of discarding books and CDs is that often the items I have *cannot* be gotten again if I want them. Case in point: my copy of Puccini’s *La Rondine*, with a very precise cast–Moffo, Sciutti, De Palma, Bergonzi, Sereni, with Mollinari-Pradelli conducting. I bought it well before copying to computer was practical, and just as I was transferring my collection to computer backup, one disc disappeared into the ether. It has not appeared since. I have searched for this cast online; it never appears on swaps, and the price? in some places well over $200. The same is going to be true of the Cluytens Hansel und Gretel, the 1947 original cast of Menotti’s “The Medium,” “The Ballad of Baby Doe” with Beverly Sills, and the like. THe moral? Grab ‘em when you can and hang on. Similarly, Paperback Swap is pretty light on most of the academic books I have bought, my university library runs to modern theology, not medieval, and the nearest uni library has draconian policies for non-member use (including no reciprocal use for faculty at other institutions.) And unless the author is *very* popular (in which case the library will have copies out the wazoo), fiction goes out of print. So go ahead and sell your Philip Pullmann and your Stephen King. Keep the early Charles de LInt chapbooks and that set of Dorothy Dunnett.

Within that, I do try to prune. If I truly have not come back to a book for years, out it goes. CDs that do not get played and aren’t beloved rarities … ditto.

People will usually seek help with symptoms in mind (financial difficulty) rather than causes – most of us living paycheck to paycheck probably don’t immediately see the link between a cluttered life and money/debt problems. It’s not always the problem, but often it’s at least part of it.

I’ve renamed @someday as @nevergoingtohappen.

I very much agree with your comment on the Post-It note syndrome.

Post-Its are great tools, but they are NOT great organizers.

Good uses I have found for Post-Its.

As a way to take notes in a book that I cannot write in. I color code the notes to the sources, and write the page number on the note, leaving it to stick up like a book mark. I can pull the post-its and stick them on a page to scan when the book goes back to its owner, or I can simple go through the book as I write to do my documentation as I write. I find it a time saver over traditional notecard use (does anybody do that anymore) and they don’t fall out of the books.

Second, a sticky note is a great tool for leaving a quick message on a colleague’s door at eye level, i.e., “Missed you. Call me about the Nielsen file.” It lets them know you actually got up to physically see them, unlike an email. I find they respond pretty promptly.

Dude, I would trust yourself. If a book did not speak to you, it is probably for a reason. We are different out here. There is no reason to expect that the same principles for ‘getting things done’ will apply the same for everyone.