How to avoid to-do STACK list?

Question

When making to do list I often have a problem of creating them as Stacks (U know first in last out list ). Some how there will be some items at the top which will block all other items , so until I pop the first one all others will be blocked and untouchable . Like

-buy jogging shoes

-start going to the gym

-have controlled amount of food

Or it can be like

-save 4000 this month

-buy that book u wanted and need

Until the first one gets done next one won't start . Sometimes the top item maybe very important ,other times it may not , but somehow I always end up creating a list in which many items depend on few items at the top and the whole thing hangs for up .

It may be a problem with me altogether . If any of you have faced something similar you can share your experience on how you got around it ?

Answer 1

So, embarrassingly, and against a number of sources of advice, my next action list is sorted by the time that the task arrived in the box, newest tasks at the top, oldest at the bottom.

One of my ways of dealing with the inefficiencies that the sort-by-entry-time method causes is to make a rule that everyday I must do the oldest task in the list and I make a general conscious effort to attack the list from the bottom up. This means I've got a 'time-window' in my next actions - I always know that all of the actions have arrived on the list in the last n days, normally this is a around five, right now it's about three. Having this 'sliding window' of next actions has the nice consequence that I know that I'm very likely to get to anything that's needed in the next five days in advance (I also review the list every morning to make sure nothing goes missing) - this nicely takes care of any deadlines further away than this. One of the really nice things about adopting a GTD-like workflow has been that deadlines tend never to get any closer than that and the problem solves itself (this answer slightly taken from How do I register deadlines in a GTD system? to which this question is slightly related)