The oven light is still broken. The project is done anyway.

Marie had the oven light on her project list. She had already put a lot of time into it, the light still didn’t work, and the whole thing wasn’t worth much money to her. It’s hardly a matter of life and death, and she can just as well look into the oven with the torch on her phone. So she deleted the project.

Kay-Dietrich asked what the next action was. There wasn’t one, Marie said; the project was gone. She was offered solutions anyway: a thermometer for the core temperature, so the roast pork doesn’t turn black without anyone noticing; taking the glass panel out; a new oven altogether. The best question came from David: “The next three times you’re standing in front of that oven, will you be annoyed or not?”

The light is still broken. The project is done anyway, and that puts it further along than many projects that have been sitting on lists for months without anything moving.

Why dead projects stay on the list

A project on your list is an agreement with yourself. You can keep it, renegotiate it or end it, but you can’t ignore it without it costing you attention. With a dead project, you make the same non-decision in every weekly review: not this week. Over time you get used to reading straight past entries, and at some point that includes the projects that count.

The first reason entries like this survive came up with Marie as well: “I’ve already put so much time into it.” That time is spent, whichever way you decide. It’s a reason to be annoyed, but not a reason to carry on.

Something else she said names the second: she wants to decide what she really wants to do, not what her head thinks she should do. Many project lists are full of these shoulds. Nobody asked for them, but they sound like something a responsible adult would get done.

Pruning your project list: four exits, not two

When pruning, most people think of two options: keep going or delete. A project that hasn’t moved for a long time has four exits, and the order in which you check them matters.

Exit	When it fits	What happens to the entry
Clarify	The finish line is missing, or the step on the list is really the one after next	reword it as an outcome, decide on the real next action
Pin down	It matters to you, but in everyday life it always loses to the urgent	turn it into a date in your calendar
Park	You want the outcome, but you have no room for it in the coming months	move it to Someday/Maybe, put the next action in the project support material
Drop	The outcome is no longer worth the remaining effort	delete it, no follow-up

Clarify when the finish line is missing

If you no longer know what a project is aiming for, you’ll decide about it on gut feeling. So the first question is whether the entry still says what should be achieved by the end.

I built myself a small bot. Once a week it goes through my project list, finds the three projects that have gone longest without anything happening, and sends me a suggestion for the next action. The first two times, what came back was nonsense, and my first thought was: the AI doesn’t understand my project. Then I looked at how the project was worded: as a topic, with no outcome. Nobody can derive a step from that, not even a machine. You can run the test without a bot: “Website” is a topic, “New homepage is live” is a finish line.

Then comes Kay-Dietrich’s question: what is the real next action? Often the one on the list is actually the one after next, and the project isn’t stalled because you can’t be bothered, but because the step can’t actually be done. Sometimes the real next action is simply: research how to solve the problem.

Pin it down when the urgent eats the important

Some projects stall because they are important and never urgent. Marie distinguishes between what has to happen and what can happen. With a work assignment, someone else has decided that it has to happen. In your personal life, you decide that yourself, because it serves something on a higher level. And then, she says, the urgent eats the important.

For me, it’s meeting up with friends. They matter to me, they’re on my list, and in everyday life they still slip to the back. They don’t belong on Someday/Maybe. The solution is to pick up the phone and fix a date: then the time is blocked out, and if something urgent comes up, I probably won’t move it any more.

Projects like these are tied to a higher horizon, and that’s exactly why they lack the deadline that would defend them against the daily grind. Pinning them down means giving them one.

Park it when there’s no room right now

Going through her project lists, Marie noticed that a lot of what was on them was Someday/Maybe material. You really do want these projects; there’s just no room for them at the moment. For me, most recently, it was a dance class: important, but there’s so much going on at work right now that there’s no room for it. Rather than sitting on the project list forever, it belongs on Someday/Maybe, as a deliberate decision about what I’m doing now and what I’m not.

As a rule of thumb: whatever you realistically won’t touch in the next three or four months belongs on the Someday/Maybe list. The next action gives you a sharper test. If you wouldn’t do it in the coming weeks anyway, it’s only getting in the way on your context list.

Conversely, not everything that sounds like an idea is a someday. When I was gathering plans for next year, I also wrote down “plan Christmas”. Christmas comes whether I plan it or not, so it became a project straight away.

Drop it when the outcome isn’t worth the rest

David’s question tests the outcome, not the entry. If you can stand in front of the dark oven three times without getting annoyed, you don’t need a project.

My own version compares two annoyances, especially when the list is full and time is short: what bothers me more, the broken light every time I see it, or the entry I read every day without having time for it? If the entry bothers me more, I think it’s fine to drop it or park it. That’s exactly how it was for Marie: the entry sat there, and nothing moved forward.

The question does have a limit, though. It rewards whatever is loud. With an oven light, that doesn’t matter. With anything tied to a higher horizon, the entry that nags you every week is often precisely the sign that the thing means something to you. Drop things there by how much they nag, and you’ll drop the wrong ones. The right exit in that case is to pin it down.

Whatever you drop is gone, with no follow-up and no guilty conscience. If it becomes important again, it lands in your inbox as a new thought, and you decide afresh.

Where it typically goes wrong

• Dropping feels like failure. Yet months of standstill are already a cancellation. Nobody has said it out loud, that’s all.
• Deciding before clarifying. If you make decisions about a title you no longer understand, you either drop things on a whim or leave everything standing out of uncertainty.
• The big clear-out stalls too. After a few months in which his system had been getting less care, David realised that he really ought to go through every project again. That’s valuable, but it takes time that’s hard to find. Three projects a week, oldest first, fit into even a full week.
• Ongoing activities are kept as projects. For Jörg, underwater rugby doesn’t belong on any list, and why would it? It’s his sport. As far as the project list goes, he’s right: his training has no finish line. Underwater rugby is on my Someday/Maybe list all the same, because of him, as something I’d like to try one day. What decides it is never the topic, but whether there’s an end.
• Length becomes the yardstick. Kay-Dietrich has 121 entries on Someday/Maybe, others have none at all, and both can be right. Two questions put to each entry tell you more: do I still understand what it’s meant to remind me of? Is it still a good idea?

Common questions

Is it OK to simply drop a project in GTD?

Yes. A project is an agreement with yourself, and agreements can be kept, renegotiated or deliberately ended. Dropping it is the honest choice when the outcome is no longer worth the remaining effort, because a project you no longer believe in costs you attention every time you go through the list.

When does a project belong on the Someday/Maybe list instead of the project list?

When you want the outcome but realistically won’t move it forward in the coming months. The next action is a reliable sign: if you wouldn’t do it in the next few weeks anyway, the project doesn’t belong on the active list.

How often should you prune your project list?

Briefly in every weekly review and thoroughly at least once a year. In the weekly review, it’s enough to check that every project has a doable next action. In a thorough pruning, every stalled project gets one of four exits: clarify, pin down, park or drop.

What do I do with the time I’ve already put into a project?

Nothing, because it’s spent whether you carry on or stop. All that matters is whether the outcome is worth the remaining effort.

How can I tell that a project is badly worded?

Nobody can derive a sensible next action from the title, not even you. A well-worded project describes the outcome, not the topic: “New homepage is live” instead of “Website”.

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Today, pick out the three projects on your project list that have gone longest without anything happening, and give each of them one of the four exits. Wherever you hesitate, start with the title.

Hardly anyone is impartial about their own project list: every project has a backstory, and it’s hard to decide against your own backstory. In a sparring session, we go through the entries you’ve been hesitating over for weeks until each one has an exit. Write to me if there’s more on your list than you honestly intend to do.