Tuesday 2010-11-23

One of the problems with something like planhack is that you can accumulate a slew of goals that you never touch, which means you never get the satisfaction of whacking them down with your mental machete.

While trying to balance my goals today with my monthly review, I ran into the wall of text that is my putative future, and gave up. I couldn't take looking at that big pile of Undone anymore. So, I declared goal bankruptcy, and moved all those goals into ~/etc/notes.txt and out of my mind.

While this was certainly temporarily gratifying, I need to prevent this buildup from happening again. My current solution is to list only the goals that are in line with my annual ones and which are accomplishable in the next month. Anything in-line with long-term goals and not schedulable goes into my in-progress annual report.

Back in Seattle, we used to joke about having a death ceremony for projects whenever you start a new one, as a way of keeping the load count constant. Anyone had to do something like this? Or found another way around this?