Yup, @DrJJWMac’s method is fairly similar to mine, although I tend to use flags slightly longer-term, which means that at any given time I might have a dozen things on my “Hotlist” over the course of a day or two, and for non-repeating tasks, defer dates (and, more specifically, times) can be more fluid.
During my Weekly Review, which I do on Monday mornings, I’ll go through every project that’s due to be reviewed (based on the review dates/cycles set for each project), and in that process, will flag tasks that I expect to get done that week, usually assigning/modifying defer dates in the process.
So, for example, I might see a task that I expect to get to that same day. That will simply get flagged. Another task I might look at and want to get done this week, but know I can’t get to until Wednesday. That may be a decision based on external factors (can’t do it yet), recognizing that I’m not going to have the time, or simply a matter of trying to balance out my week by shifting lower priority things utnil later). In any of those cases, I’d adjust the defer date for Wednesday and flag it. That way it comes up on Wednesday morning on my Hotlist, ready to go.
During my daily review, I look first at my Hotlist for the day. This is a custom perspective that includes all available Due or Flagged items, with Due items sorted at the top. I’ll ask myself what I realistically expect to accomplish that day, and sometimes defer things until the next day if I know there’s no way I’m going to get to it. Occasionally I’ll even unflag something that’s simply become no longer important for the week. In that case, it goes back into the ‘pool’ for the next Weekly Review the following Monday.
Note that with “Due” sorting in a perspective, you end up with every due item at the top, regardless of how far in the future the due dates are. As a result, I rarely have due and flagged items that are more than a couple of days into the future – they’re either unflagged (which is fine, as they’ll come up automatically when they’re within 24 hours of being due), or flagged with a defer date if I need them on my list more than 24 hours in advance. That’s also rare, however, since the whole point of GTD is breaking tasks down into manageable, bite-sized chunks, so tasks should be simple enough that I don’t need to know about them more than 24 hours in advance. In other words, while an entire project may be due on Friday afternoon, there should be steps that take me toward the completion of that project that show up sooner than that anyway.
I also have two sub-versions of my Hotlist that I work from. One focuses on all of my “Work” projects, while the other focuses on my “Personal” projects. During the evenings and weekends I’m likely to work exclusively from the “Personal” one, while on a busy workday, I flip over to the “Work” one and ignore the “Personal” one. As a self-employed person who works primarily from home, however, even that is somewhat fluid, which is why I keep the combined “Hotlist” that includes both; when less work stuff is going on I will tend to mix and match both personal and work tasks.
I don’t normally mind having up to about a dozen things hanging around on my Hotlist – that’s enough to scan and pick and choose at a glance; any more than that can start to feel overwhelming, so If either of my Hotlists are getting busy on a given day, I will use defer times to drop things later into the day, to sort of schedule my day. I generally just do this in established time chunks, however: 1:00 PM for afternoon tasks, 5:00 PM for “after work” tasks. I never UNflag unless I’m really dropping a task off my list entirely for the week, which is very rare.
I also have two other key perspectives that I work in for specific modes: Household and Errands. These include all available items in either of those categories, with the names being somewhat self-descriptive. Most Household chores are repeating, and the important ones still get flagged so they come up in my Hotlist, but a lot of other more routine “when I get around to it” stuff simply gets dropped into the appropriate project and context without a flag. When I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and tackle some housework, I just pull up that perspective and anything available is there, waiting to go. A lot of these are also recurring tasks, with defer dates to keep them off my radar until they’re ready to be done again (e.g. wash bedding, vacuum rugs, mow lawn, etc – none of them are critical enough to warrant a flag, but they make a useful checklist of things that need to be done whenever I’m in that kind of a mode).
