I can offer something to your comment “Doesn’t this get right back to what David said in the original GTD book… Prioritized lists simply fail (like Steven Covey’s 7 Habits quadrant system).”

So many people we coach have tons of backlogged reading and get so many “wouldn’t it be nice to read” kind of stuff that they are buried in choices. Julie’s tips are really specific to triaging reading–not other input. I wouldn’t treat other input this same way.

Kelly

One thing that’s really helped me with the non-critical but ‘want to read’ category is my iPad. Now that I can download issues, I can read stuff during downtime – airplane/travel time, riding ex. bike, 10 mins before bed without the guilt factor of stealing the paper version from the house when I’m on trips (my wife and teenage son really dig into Economist– kinda scary; you don’t want to misstate facts when you get home from a trip! :) :) )

Web stuff is done on my DroidX when I am waiting with others. My fiction book sits next to my bed. Non-Fiction is done in the morning when I am fresh.

Non-Fiction at night is used as a sleeping aid.

Equally important, though, I would argue, is a periodic review to make sure what once went into that bucket is still something you’d put in there today.

I’ve talked about this in my writing on Discardia: we change over time but we often experience a lag in acknowledging that change, particularly where our aspirations are involved. We hold onto expectations of what we should know and we hold onto the objects which we thought would bring us to that state of competence.

It is curiously as difficult for us to let go of something we thought we should study as it is to drop a project that no longer serves our current bigger picture goals. That reluctance shows up in our words – biting the bullet, purging, weeding, culling – painting a picture of us killing off something alive.

As a mental exercise, consider a different metaphor next time you look at those buckets:
“Does this train go to the station I’m trying to reach?”

Just because you don’t decide to take it, the train doesn’t vanish from the world or cease to be useful to other people.

I (and lots of others, so this may not be news!) recommend using the Instapaper.com service to save articles for later, organize and archive them, and transport them to your Kindle or iPad for later reading.