Feature request: focus during my weekly review

I would love to be forced to consider only one item at a time inside of a given list (looking at you, my Someday/Maybe list). Every week I end up just giving each item in that list a cursory glance instead of actually considering each one on its own, and I think the design of having every task visible at all times makes it easier for me to distract myself (oh, look at that other task, that’s much easier to process, forget about the one you were currently looking at). Brain takes the path of least resistance it seems.

How this would work ideally, in my head: I’m inside a list, say Someday/Maybe, I press f and I’m now only able to see a single task at once. I then have to decide there and then whether I want to move it to “Next Items” (n), modify it in some way (m) or delete it (d). When I’ve pressed a button I move onto the next item and can then only see that one item, until I’m done with the list or I press Esc or something.

I seem to remember David Allen talking about the importance of considering one thing at a time. While it’s generally very useful to see everything all at once, I think for the “Processing” GTD step it can feel overwhelming, especially during the weekly review when the number of things to consider is at a peak (at least for me it is).

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Thank you for the thoughtful suggestion. I agree that something like this would be really useful, but I see it as part of a bigger project to add proper application support for the weekly review beyond just going through lists manually.

I think without more a structured review workflow in the app, you would have to constantly switch between the single-item view and the regular view.

So doing it properly is a big piece of work, and I won’t promise anything. I have a ticket for implementing a structured review mode in the app, which will have some element of what you are asking for, so you can be sure it aligns with the general direction of development.

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