“Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them”, at least according to David Allen. This is all well and good, but why do my systems always end up with me still holding everything in my head?

It’s trust. It’s always trust. I lose trust in my systems. And then I burn them down and start again. It’s a pattern. Part of it, of course, is painting the hammer (“ooh, shiny new app!”), but I’ve started to notice a pattern behind the pattern.

See, every time I start a new system, there’s a honeymoon period. It does work. I do trust it.

Then suddenly, after weeks or months, I notice that it’s stopped working. The ideas have started to build up, unloved. The inbox is overflowing, the momentum is gone.

I wake at 3 in the morning, trying to remember if I added that critical task to the project. I grab my phone, it’s not in the inbox, it’s not in the project. Where is it? I add it to the inbox and go back to sleep, but it’s fitful. Will I really ever see it again?

See, the system has gone from a place of action to a dumping ground. Despite my best efforts to keep things “organised”, all I’m doing is shuffling tasks from place to place. The projects end up with a mix of things to do, ideas for things to do, notes that I think are important, and very little room for actual clarity on what the next thing to work on is.

I’ve gone from farming to gardening. It’s exhausting, leaving me very little time to harvest any crops. And I’ve returned to holding the important stuff in my brain again.

But when did it happen? This time, I found the trap.

The systems always start out the same: a simple list. A brain dump of everything in my mind. The pattern is familiar to anyone who’s spent a minute looking at productivity. Get it all out, then organise it into actions. Notice where an “action” is really a project, and break it down into actual actions.

So I did this, but decided not to do the breakdown. Not yet. What would happen if I just left the “get a new job” project as a task on the list, alongside “take out the bin” and “email changes to the bathroom refit quote”?

It was so crazy it might just work. It also aligned with the underlying idea of this system from Mark Forster, which he calls “resistance zero”. You just have one list, and work on whatever you feel zero resistance for. The hook is that you have to read the whole list, every time you’re choosing what to work on next.

I combined this with Kourosh Dini’s idea of a “visit”. Rather than thinking of “get a new job” as a binary “Only check it off when it’s complete”, I tried thinking of it as an invitation to do “something” on the project. To sit with it.

So, I started. Sat with “get a new job” and figured out there were four or five things I could do right now to move it forward. I added those things to the list, picked a couple, and worked on them.

All good.

The day wore on, and I made progress on the list. I was using Things at the time, just using the “anytime” view to see everything in one list. Ideas kept coming up for actions I could take to get a job, and I added them to the bottom of the list. Resistance remained high to them, so they stayed on the list.

Day turned to night, night turned to day, and in the light of the morning, I saw that I truly, really had a project on my hands. Half of the tasks were to do with the Get a Job project. I was glossing over them as a unit, and what I really wanted to do was see them all together. I wanted to work on “get a job”, to visit with it, to shut everything else out and work on that, to make progress on it. I wanted it to be organised, so that I could get a clear view of it.

So I made a project.

I moved all the related tasks into the project.

And though I didn’t quite realise it yet, the trap was sprung.

Projects feel inevitable. A project is just a list of related actions that build to an outcome. “Get a job” is not an action. I can’t “just” do that. I need to update my CV, find job adverts, write cover letters, write emails, consider what I even want to do, budget out how much money I need and so on.

So we create projects, whether it’s a page in the notebook, a heading in the text file, or an actual “Project” in the to-do app. This becomes a container for all the things, all the actions I listed above, and so on. The organisation feels like it’s progress, like “Okay, so now I can see everything I need to do”.

But all that’s actually happened is that we’ve created needless complexity. We’ve hidden all those actions behind the goal. We now have to work on two things: getting a job, and those actions. It can be easy to fall into the trap of just completing the actions, rather than heading for the outcome.

Worse than that, though, was what I had actually done. I had created an albatross. A shrine to the idea of the outcome.

See, by giving the outcome its own space, it had become separated from the bit of me that did the work. I now had two jobs: doing the work, and planning the work. This is fine when you have a team, but I’m just me.

Except I’m not just me. I am managing a team. I’m managing my workload right now, I’m delegating things to future me, and I’m picking up stuff that past me couldn’t get to.

But past me doesn’t know jack shit about my current context. They guess, but they don’t know. Those actions they left me: are they still relevant? Do I need to preserve them somewhere?

And what about future me? Sure, that idea past me had to reach out to my old boss and see if they have anything interesting I could help with, I don’t think that’s relevant just now, but what if future me loves the idea?

Better keep it around.

Because the project is a safe haven for cruft. It’s separate from the “main list” of stuff to do, so all manner of crap can accumulate in the projects. It hangs around “just in case”, because I’m sure past me had some good intentions.

But by over-indexing on past me, I’m dooming future me to drown in shit.

And guess what. Future me, at some point, is going to say “yeah, fuck that” and stop even looking at the project. They’re going to go back to holding it all in their head.

Trap sprung, future me fucked.

So what now? Am I consigned to concluding that we can’t complete complex things? Obviously not. Well, hopefully that’s obvious.

The problem isn’t the complexity. It’s not even the projects. It’s the accumulation. Projects just make it easier to hide the accumulation.

Ultimately, it comes down to curation. It comes down to editing. Past me just comes up with ideas, suggestions. That’s all the list is: Suggestions from past me.

Dini talks about “honouring” the past self by at least showing up to those suggestions. Deciding not to do them is absolutely a valid course of action.

But I wasn’t even showing up. I was kicking the can down the road, and I was giving myself permission to do this because they were all tied to “get a job”. So everything remained on the table till that project was completed.

My solution? Stop organising.

When I keep everything on the one list, there’s not only nowhere to hide, but I start to feel it when the list gets too long. There’s always going to be more I could add to the list, and I will likely add it, but by adding it to the one list, it makes it more obvious what stuff I can cut. What stuff I can show up to and say “thanks past me. I’m not going to do this now, but if it comes up again future me can add it back”.

So the project process now is quite simple:

1. Decide to work on “get a job”;
2. Add some actions to the one list;
3. Work on some of those actions till I decide to stop working on “get a job”;
4. SCORE OFF “GET A JOB”, and then add it to the end of the list again for future me to work on when they want to;
5. SCORE OFF ANY REMAINING ACTIONS FROM 3. If future me needs them, they’ll come back.

Because it turns out the trust isn’t only in the system holding the ideas. It’s in trusting the system to hold the ideas only as long as they’re useful, in trusting present me to weed out which ideas are not worth holding on to, and in trusting my brain to have more ideas in future.

After all, having ideas is what it’s for.