People usually don’t do enough maintenance on their task list, which leaves it overburdened. Old unfinished work, raw ideas that aren’t tasks but more like puzzles to solve. (What did I mean by that?) Tasks you don’t really want to do, or honestly lack the energy to do now.
Setting up a new system feels more productive than doing that maintenance. The former results in a clean, shiny new system, while the latter doesn’t give such a clearly visible result.
Doing maintenance involves making hard choices. You have to face your own limitations as you decide whether each stale task should be put off or discarded. Doing it all at once, by declaring your system bankrupt, feels easier.
Poorly formulated tasks feel overwhelming. Just looking at them invites a panic attack, and we usually succumb to procrastination to rescue ourselves. Correctly named tasks feel like “Why would I even write it down? It’s so quick and easy!”
No, it’s not quick and easy, but you don’t know that, and you never ever learn to correct this underestimation bias.
Again. A good task list looks as if you’ve put more work into compiling it than into doing the work itself. Too much work, they say. And then they go back to their usual road-to-burnout routine, which apparently is not that much work, is it?
Next, learn the basics: Tool-agnostic GTD essentials by a decade-long practitioner.