One unfortunate property of most long-term to-do lists is they have a tendency to get stale—full of items that are no longer priorities or perhaps no longer make sense at all. This can be dangerous, since it means that checking this system is mostly a waste of time, which makes you (not unreasonably) disinclined to do it. This makes you less likely to trust the system as a safe place to put an important or time-sensitive item, because you’re not actively checking & processing it.

In theory, one can avoid this by strictly adhering to very regular processing, such as the weekly review prescribed by Getting Things Done™ (GTD). In practice, almost everyone will miss these reviews sometimes, and even when everything has been processed once, it can still go stale in the deeper system.

So what do you do?

Here are some general approaches:

1) Throw the whole thing out.

There’s a concept called “Inbox Bankruptcy”, when you finally admit that you’re never going to get to the nine hundred unread emails in your inbox, and you figure the only way you’ll even possibly be able to stay on top of it all is if you just start fresh. So you archive everything. This one is by far the simplest, though also the most drastic.

2) Put it… somewhere else. Then deal with it… “later”.

This one is an old favorite of mine. You give all of the stale stuff a flag that says it’s stale, and then you archive it. Then if you really need it later, you can perhaps find it, but you don’t have to deal with it regularly anymore. In theory, you’ll eventually go deal with all of it, but in practice you won’t actually bother, and… that’s okay.

You can also do this one in real-time, with incoming emails or newsletters. I love routing unimportant things to a place that I check semi-regularly… then within a week or two, I find myself never checking it. Somehow, as important as it all seemed in my inbox, once it’s gone, I don’t miss it.

3) Give yourself a small amount of time to process it all; then chuck the rest

If the above two options sound kind of attractive, but you just know there’s at least a couple of really important items in there, then you can use the Piñata approach. Set a timer for 10 minutes, or for 25 minutes, and give yourself that long to glance through and 1-by-1 grab anything that feels super key. After the timer ends, destroy everything that remains (or, as in #2, stow it somewhere else).

4) Block off a few hours (or days) and process it all

If for some reason you have a ton of time on your hands, then you can actually just process everything. It might take hours or even days, but you can do it. David Allen says that the first step of setting up a GTD system is to find time (ideally a whole week) to just process everything and put it all in its place… to lay the foundation for the rest of the system.

When your system gets stale, you can also do this processing in medias res, provided you can find the time to do it. Though even if you have that time, it might not be worth spending in such a way.

5) Do things off of it that feel appealing

I don’t generally recommend this, because it still leaves you with a stale system, but you could perhaps combine it with something like #3 and go through the list and just do ones that seem attractive, then after perhaps two passes of this, discard the rest. This is essentially how Mark Forster’s Autofocus System works.

Complice is designed so that no matter how stale your other systems are, it’s fresh every day. Whatever your sense is of what’s most important, Complice will help you make progress on it today. Sign up here »