Comment by kenada

I’m in my mid-40s. I’ve been practicing GTD for about a decade. My system used to be fairly elaborate in the beginning, but now it’s fairly simple. However, I don’t view it as an organizational system. It’s a tool for me to be confident that I’m doing the right thing right now.

For organizing reference material, I have a drawer with files for physical things and cloud storage and notes for digital things. I label it by topic as it seems appropriate/obvious. I review my reference material annually, deleting or destroying anything that’s not still needed.

In practice, I don’t actually engage with my system much. I review it weekly to clear out any next actions I did. It’s there as a backstop (i.e., I use deadlines as appropriate in OmniFocus) and to help keep me aware of my hard and soft landscapes.

(I lost my weekly review habit for a while, and that was bad for me and my system. I’m glad I’ve reestablished it.)

If (for example) I decide to hack on nixpkgs stuff tonight, I don’t need a task for that. I may capture one to resume later, but what’s important is that I know what I’m not doing, and I’m fine with that. If it turns out I’m not, then that’s a sign I need to renegotiate or delegate some of those things.