Introduction
A few months after our first exchange, T. S. — the same reader whose thoughtful questions had sparked the previous Private Q&A post — contacted me again. His message began with a line that immediately brought me back to the sincerity of our earlier correspondence:
Thank you once again for your generous reply and for the work you have shared on your blog. I wanted to briefly let you know how meaningful it has been for me.T. S.
What followed, however, went beyond the technical questions he eventually asked. Before getting there, he shared a more personal reflection. Because of this, the exchange naturally divides itself into two parts. With his permission once again, I’m sharing both sides here. The first section revisits the personal note he sent and the reflections it prompted. The second presents the Q&A almost as it unfolded: his questions, my answers, and a few asides where additional context may help others walking a similar path.
When the conversation turns personal
Before turning to the practical questions he had prepared, T. S. shared something more personal. He wrote about the long road he had been on — how implementing GTD had taken him far longer than expected, not because of the method itself, but because life had intervened in a way that many of us know all too well. He had gone through a burnout. And in hindsight, he observed something painfully familiar: that we often begin changing how we work only when the way we work has already become unsustainable.
In hindsight, it seems many of us only start changing how we work when things already feel unsustainable. Reading your reflections, especially around burnout, helped me put my own experience into perspective, and even encouraged me to start meditating, which has become a valuable part of my recovery.T. S.
His words struck a chord. Burnout is not an abstract concept for me; it is something I have lived through myself. Years ago, back when I was still in the US, I hit that wall without the tools I have today. Meditation was not part of my life then, and looking back, I wish it had been.
I’m now in a much better place and motivated to implement GTD more fully, so I wanted to sincerely thank you for your openness and clarity.T. S.
It’s a strange thing, receiving a message like that. You write into the void for years, never knowing who reads, who skims, who quietly walks away. And then someone reaches out to say that a fragment of your story — a line, a post, a passing confession — resonated with them at exactly the moment they needed it. It’s humbling. It’s grounding. And it’s a reminder that the invisible threads between writer and reader are sometimes stronger than we imagine.
Thank you for your kind words — they truly mean a great deal to me. Writing about my system has always been something I do quietly, mostly hoping it might help someone out there, so hearing that it has been meaningful for you is incredibly rewarding. I’m genuinely glad that the posts, and our exchange, have supported you in your own journey with GTD. It’s a privilege to know that something I shared has had a positive impact.CogitActive
The actual Q&A
After sharing his personal reflections, T. S. turned to the practical side of things. As he continued refining his GTD setup, he had seven thoughtful questions — each touching on a different aspect of the OneNote GTD system.
As I continue refining my setup, a few questions came up. Please feel absolutely free to answer only those that are easiest or most interesting to you—any insight at all would already be very helpful.T. S.
On project structure
What does your “active projects” overview page look like today? Is it mainly an index, or does it contain additional information? And is it linked bi-directionally to the individual project support pages?
Let me start with your last question: no, my “active projects” overview page is not linked bi-directionally to the individual project pages. In fact, it’s one of the very few places in the whole system where I deliberately avoid linking. A rare exception indeed.
Originally, I created this page as a kind of prioritization dashboard. I keep three columns — Work, CogitActive, and Life — and list the active projects under each. Sometimes I tag them with the classic labels (Critical, Important & Urgent, Important, Urgent), but to be honest, those tags don’t influence much in practice. They’re more decorative than functional.
Where this page does shine is in helping me control the number of active projects. If the list in any column grows so long that it no longer fits on a single screen, that’s a clear warning sign. It means I’ve taken on more than I can realistically manage. For me, that threshold is roughly twenty-something projects per area — beyond that, things start slipping.
It’s also a surprisingly good way to check the balance between areas. If one column is overflowing while another is nearly empty, it tells me something about where my attention has been drifting. So while the page isn’t sophisticated, and it doesn’t interact with the rest of the system through links, it plays an important role as a visual sanity check.
I also noticed that your project pages use ID indices. Is there a particular logic behind these (e.g., chronological or thematic), or are they mainly intended for uniqueness and reference?
The IDs you see in the Project List page (the first column of the table) are purely for reference. There’s no thematic or chronological logic behind them — each time I add a project, regardless of its status, it simply receives the next number in sequence (e.g., P_000099).
What matters is how I use that ID. The ID cell itself contains a link that points directly to the project’s page. That page might live in the Projects section, or in Someday/Maybe — it doesn’t matter. Even when a project is completed, the ID and its link remain valid. This consistency makes navigation extremely easy.
So the IDs aren’t meant to encode meaning; they’re just a stable, unique way to reference and jump between the index and the individual project pages.
On working with energy and friction
Have you ever found that a project remained well-defined in OneNote, yet still stalled in practice, and if so, what helped you restart or re-engage with it?
Yes — absolutely. This happens to me most often with Life and CogitActive projects. They can be perfectly well defined in OneNote and still be completely stalled in practice. In my case, the root cause is usually the same: I’ve been working too much, and the “non-work” projects quietly get pushed aside.
What has helped me re-engage is time blocking (more on that in the next answer). To rebalance things toward something resembling a healthier life, I now protect blocks of time specifically for these neglected areas. When I’m in one of those blocks, I activate the relevant contextual tag and simply work through the actions for that long-abandoned project.
A small example: one of my “Life” projects was to watch the old “Dungeons & Dragons” 80s cartoon with my son. It kept getting postponed because I “never had time.” Once I put a recurring weekly block 2 on my calendar for it, the project suddenly came back to life. Sometimes the structure is what creates the space.
Of course, this only applies to projects that are unintentionally stalled. If a project is consciously parked, it belongs in Someday/Maybe, not on the active list.
During periods of low energy or cognitive overload, do you intentionally rely more on Outlook obligations, or do you find yourself working more from OneNote tag summaries?
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t use Outlook anymore. My calendar is my main anchor now, and it’s where all my real commitments live. So I don’t switch to Outlook during low energy periods — I simply stay within my calendar and OneNote.
But let me add something you didn’t ask, because it’s been very present for me lately. At work, I’ve had to cancel — or rather, reassign — many of my important blocks (reading, learning, PubMed, etc.) to deal with things that were “important and so urgent that even critical didn’t feel strong enough.” My goal is always to protect those blocks, but also to stay flexible when reality demands it.
As for energy and overload, you may have seen from my last post how rough the past days have been. And yet, I still managed to complete everything I had planned for the week — including replying to you now. The reason is simple: I started with the tasks my condition actually allowed. As I recovered, I gradually moved on to more demanding work.
If I had forced myself to begin with the critical items, I would have crashed and lost the entire day (or several). Instead, by doing the easy things first, I kept momentum and gave myself space to regain capacity.
On evolution
In earlier posts, you mentioned time blocking. I was wondering whether you still actively use time blocking today, and how it fits alongside your current setup.
Yes — I still use time blocking, and in fact, it has become the center of everything. My entire week is built around it. I keep a calendar page (Excel file) that shows all my blocks in different colors — a kind of template — and every Sunday I sit down with actual colored pencils (yes, really) and shade in the coming week (in my paper calendar). It’s a small ritual I’ve grown to appreciate.
I adapt the blocks in advance when I know something will need to shift, but as I mentioned earlier, sometimes a block gets “kidnapped” by something more urgent. That’s life. Even so, the structure remains incredibly helpful.
The real power of time blocking, for me, is that it removes the constant question of “What should I do next?” When I enter a block — say, “Learn statistics” — I immediately know which contextual tag to activate and which actions belong to that space. No more wasted time trying to decide what I could or should be doing. Before I used blocks, I had too many choices, and that often led to paralysis. It’s a bit like people who wear the same outfit every day: they don’t waste energy choosing 3. Time blocking does the same for me.
And as I mentioned earlier, it’s also the only reliable way I’ve found to protect time for what truly matters.
Finally, have you made any further refinements to your GTD methodology since the 2.0 setup, conceptually or practically, that you haven’t written about yet?
I don’t think I’ve made any major refinements since the 2.0 setup — nothing substantial enough to write about, at least. I’m still trying to empty my original inbox, which has become its own long-term project. But the heart of the system, the Projects structure, continues to work beautifully. That part really has held up.
Of course, I still run into the classic GTD dilemma: sometimes it feels like it would take less time to just do the task than to write it down properly. But every time I’m tempted, I remind myself to resist that impulse and trust the system. Capturing it is what keeps everything coherent and prevents things from slipping through the cracks. And in the long run, that discipline pays off.
Moving forward, one project at a time
Exchanges like this one remind me that systems don’t evolve in isolation. They grow through practice, reflection, and sometimes through the questions someone else is kind enough to ask. Answering T. S.’s message was one of those moments — a chance to articulate things I hadn’t fully put into words, and to revisit parts of my setup with fresh eyes.
If questions and conversations are what help a system grow, it makes sense to keep the door to those conversations open for as long as the work itself is alive. Closing comments too early cuts off exactly the kind of exchange that makes all of this worthwhile. The bonus project is simply an attempt to restore that possibility—to make it easier for these dialogues to happen whenever someone arrives with a question and the willingness to engage.
And once again, I’ll let T. S. have the last word:
Thank you again for the depth, generosity, and thoughtfulness with which you share your system. It has been genuinely helpful to me, both practically and personally.T. S.
1 Not only did I leave the exchange untouched (apart from fixing a couple of my typos — the original reply was written while I was recovering from a high fever), but I even kept his own headings. ^
2 Little clarification here (not included in the email). I didn’t create a 30‑minute block called watch an episode of “Dungeons & Dragons”. That wouldn’t have been optimal — I would have used it for 27 episodes and been done (well, 28, technically). Instead, I created a 30‑minute block for “playful time” with my son, where he can choose among several activities; watching a cartoon is one of them, and “Dungeons & Dragons” happens to be one of the options. ^
3 I first came across this concept (wearing the same outfit daily) in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, where Jeff Goldblum’s character explains his choice. I believe — though I’m not completely certain — that Steve Jobs did something similar. ^