Starry starry...

So lets say you have 30 or 40 actions in your "Office" context. You know that there are a handful of them that you should be working on today but because the list of so long you stare at it wondering what you should do next. You pick out one action, do it, then come back to your list, stare at again, scanning up and down to find what you want to do next. As your eyes move up and down the text starts to swim before your eyes and you begin to think of procrastination activities (like coding MonkeyGTD perhaps ;). What you need is a way avoid the repeated scan and mental selection of actions to be done next. You could print our your list and use a highlighter pen. (I've done this). But perhaps there is a better way.

Some discussion recently on the mailing list suggested the addition of an Important flag. I tend to agree it's a practical necessity to help in the above scenario, however I am wary of it since if you concede that you need an Important flag then it's just a small step to conceding a multi-level priority indicator, ie, high/medium/low, or worse, level 1 2 3 4 .. 99 etc, which would the wrong direction for GTD I think. (If really want this it will be easy to add -- stay tuned for upcoming howto -- but it won't be in the default configuration).

So anyway instead of an Important flag, how about gmail-like stars. Go take a look. A star can mean whatever you like. In a project review you might star the projects that need some attention. In the scenario above you might star the actions you need to do right away. You can also star Areas or anything else you like. To see what's starred you click "starred" in the top menu. On the left are your starred actions. On the right are starred other things.

I've been using this now for a little while and so far I think it's pretty handy. To upgrade... er not sure, just fetch everthing.