Lists cannot be too long, if you are going to use them effectively. How many times have you created a to-do list for yourself, and everything was going fine for a few days, until eventually you got bogged down and started procrastinating? I find it incredibly easy to convince myself that, paradoxically, I have so many things to do that I might as well not do any of them. This does not bode well for productivity.

Over the last half of last year, I stopped seeing myself as a task-completing machine, who should optimize his throughput of actions for maximal efficiency. I realized that it wasn’t making me any happier, just checking more things off my list, since the other half of the time I was hiding from the morass of tasks. Yet again I’ve remembered that lists are merely tools for being an effective person.

It’s important to keep perspective as you go through life — otherwise you might end up in the wrong place. I realized that it’s not important what actions I complete; it is only important where they are getting me. So, I still use the GTD system, but with a few caveats:

• I keep a short list, on my whiteboard, of the tasks I should finish ASAP.
• I make sure this list doesn’t exceed ten or so items.
• I don’t let any item sit on the list too long: complete it or scrub it.
• If I let the whole list sit for too long, I have to finish as many actions as possible in the next free moment I get.
• If the whole list gets stale, I throw it out and start over. They obviously weren’t the right tasks anyway.
• I warehouse tasks not important enough for my whiteboard list on my Next Actions list.
• I review my Next Actions list periodically to see if any actions should be whiteboarded. Stale actions get thrown out.

The key change I’ve seen is that my lists are much, much smaller. Constant pruning of my Next Actions list has kept it under 15 items for a few months now. And I’ve never felt better.

This week begins my normal, much more open, schedule — three classes, no more than 4hrs/day, no class before 10am, no class on Fridays. And I am going to get on top of things again, and it is going to be awesome. I have a lot of emails, a lot of blog posts in my Reader, a lot of drafts and emails and phone calls I owe people. But that’s all going to come under control soon. I know that by the end of the week I’ll be back in command. Getting Things Done always has my back.

I’m not a GTD-wizard yet, but it keeps me sane.

As I’ve written, I’m on the GTD system. It’s the most effective way of managing my commitments that I’ve found yet. But you need to control your system or it will control you. I think this is what’s been happening to me. Of the lists I keep, my main ones are Action lists and my Projects list. Action lists record all the little tasks you need to do. A projects list tracks longer-term commitments that might need multiple action steps before they’re complete.

My folly, I think, is in using my Action lists as a to-do list. Sometimes I think “Oh man, I have things I need to do,” and then try to crank through one of my Action lists. It is overwhelming. At any time I have between 30 and 70 actions queued up, and that’s just far too many to be able to look at and not freak out about.

But I think those lists are best used as a simple corral of your commitments (like an unordered set, if you will). When I have a chunk of time during which I want to accomplish things, here is my new strategy: first, scan over my actions list for about five tasks that I can accomplish given my context, time at hand, and energy level; then work off those five tasks as my todo list. In theory, it’s hard to get overwhelmed by a small number of tasks that you’ve specifically chosen to be do-able.

We’ll see how it goes.

I’m not going to pontificate now, though (not too much anyway). If you’re interested, the book is a fantastic read, A+++ Would Buy Again Great Shipping. Anyone who is an organization junkie needs a copy.

For the uninitiated, one facet of GTD is lists — and lots of them. If you’re not comfortable creating, maintaining, and tracking lists, you’re going to have issues wrapping your head around GTD. One list you’ll come back to a lot is your Projects List, where (surprise!) you keep all your projects. A project in GTD is very broadly defined: anything in your world you have committed to changing, that isn’t currently the way it should be, is a project. Some of my current projects include “Get new running shoes”, “Plan Boston weekend trip”, and “Get reimbursed for eye glasses”.

Essentially these are all the things I’m juggling at one time. The balls I need to keep in the air, if you will, or the plates I have to keep spinning. One thing that impresses me about GTD is the sheer number of projects I can be working on at once. Right now I have 46 items on my Projects List. I never had such precise numbers before I started using GTD, but I have a hunch I could juggle maybe ten things at once, and likely fewer if they were big things. Too many blips on my radar screen and I would stop dropping the ball, plates would stop spinning, and stress ensued.

Now that happens rarely, if ever. If you feel like you want to get control of your life, David Allen has something to teach you.