Ditchability

How to keep a system from being too brittle

Photo by Gary Chan on Unsplash

The last time I made a major shift in my systems was two years ago. As I wrote in a three-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3), I was unsatisfied, not only with my work itself but also the way I was approaching my systems with GTD and all the rest. I felt a bit like a hamster running frantically on a wheel, all activity and no progress. Can you relate?

I made some changes back then that included a concept I never explicitly wrote about, until today, that’s less about the systems and more about how I relate to them in real life. I made the following rule and still abide by it: The systems I use must allow for “ditchability”.

What is ditchability?

Ditchability¹ is the property of “stuff” (tasks, projects, calendar events, etc.) that makes them easier or harder to reprioritize in the moment, based on inputs you didn’t plan for. I think of this in terms of lowering the priority of something, possibly to the point of removing it from your system entirely — “ditching” it, in other words — when something else happens that disrupts the system. Easier to reprioritize means higher ditchability, harder means lower ditchability.

Let’s take an example from real life, namely me, back in the day when my three kids were little. My plans for a typical working day would include teaching a couple of classes, attending a couple of meetings, and working on various teaching and research projects in between, as well as personal plans for the evenings. I usually set up all those daily plans at my weekly review so that on any given day, and any time of the day, I have a sense of what I should be doing as well as what I should not be doing². Which is all well and good — until I get that phone call from my son’s elementary school telling me that he got sick in class and somebody (me) needs to come pick him up.

Suddenly, I have to think about what I can ditch and what I can’t. My scheduled classes for the day have somewhat low ditchability. They are normally top-priority and that priority is difficult to lower, meaning that I’ll attempt to teach them if at all possible (for example by shifting them to online for the day, or finding a colleague who can cover). Blocks of time for grading papers, on the other hand, have higher ditchability. I need to get those done (relatively high priority) but if something comes up (like taking care of a sick kid), it’s fairly easy to shuffle the time block to elsewhere in the week or later. And most of the time the personal plans in the evenings are 100% ditchable (ask any parent); you try to stick to them but if life happens, they are typically the easiest to move.

What my rule then says, is that if I have a system for productivity or intentionality or whatever you want to call it, that doesn’t factor in ditchability, it’s sub-optimal because it’s “brittle” — any disruption to the system breaks it. My systems must be supple enough to allow renegotiations of priorities, in the moment, based on new information, and still work.

Many approaches to productivity don’t work because of how brittle they are. Plain to-do lists, for example, tend to fall apart when life doesn’t go the way you planned. You might have 5-10 things on such a list to get done today, but that assumes a particular vision of “today” that doesn’t involve your kid throwing up in class. And for academics, if it’s not a sick kid, it’s going to be something else: a meeting that goes overtime and eats your next time block, or an unplanned hallway conversation. Or all of these! This approach basically assumes nothing is ditchable and all things are of equal priority. And then, your to-do list (which was already probably too long) becomes impossible to complete, and the system, such as it is, breaks — and because it is blind to ditchability, it makes you feel miserable and guilty.

On the other hand, a ditchable-friendly system has built-in grace to give you permission, and rules of engagement, to renegotiate priorities if the moment calls for it.

How do you build a system like that? I think there are three key “pillars” to it.

The First Pillar of Ditchability: Alignment

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I’m going go back to something I stressed in my last post: If you are in a situation (as each of us is, every day) that is in constant flux, then you must know what your values, roles, and primary life goals are — the things that change no more than once or twice in your life — to navigate unsteady waters, and your system must be based on aligning those with your lower-altitude projects and plans. Without such knowledge, and without aligning it with day-to-day plans, ditchability is an impossibility.

Standard GTD methodology doesn’t talk much about this explicitly, but it does say a lot about alignment of the various horizons of focus. When your Horizon 0 (tasks), Horizon 1 (projects), and so on up through Horizon 4 (3-5 year vision) and Horizon 5 (purpose and principles) are coordinated, then you have a direct chain of command from the smallest action all the way up to your life plans. You need that perspective to estimate the ditchability of a task, or even a project or a higher goal. Being clear on this alignment will help you cut through the brain fog that descends the moment that well-laid plans go out of kilter and make decisions with integrity.

The Second Pillar of Ditchability: Big Rocks

There’s this famous illustration about how to pack a bunch of rocks into a small container. The short version is that if you try to put in the small stuff first, the big rocks will never fit. But if you put the big rocks in first and then pour the smaller stuff into the container, all of it fits.

The application should be clear: All of us have a lot of stuff to cram into a given day or week, and if we want to succeed, we have to determine what the “Big Rocks” are and put those in first, then let the smaller stuff fall where it will.

This is getting much more into the tactical weekly planning aspect of a system. I think the week is a good unit of time to use for planning, since it aligns with the idea of a weekly review, and because often “ditching” something on a given day means rescheduling it, and it’s easier to do that on a week-to-week basis (i.e. something you planned to do on Tuesday gets bumped to Thursday).

Here’s how I do this on a weekly basis. At my weekly review, I look ahead and think about what my highest priority tasks are for the week. I keep this limited to between three and six items, and those are my Big Rocks. If you have more than six things that are “highest priority”, then it’s likely that none of them are high priority. Then I look ahead at my calendar for the week and I schedule enough time blocks for those Big Rocks to get done — assuming no disruptions. And then I treat those time blocks as appointments, on the same level as scheduled classes or meetings — and with the same, low level of ditchability.

Many academics approach high-priority weekly tasks with this approach, but introduce failure points. They might have too many big rocks, for instance; remember, six (about one per day) is probably the upper limit. Or they underestimate the time involved. Or perhaps most likely, they treat those time blocks with too high of a level of ditchability, canceling them or moving them to some point into the far future based on the slightest disruptions in the day.

A ditchability-friendly system translates your understanding of your higher horizons down to something concrete that you can put onto the schedule on a weekly basis, in the form of the Big Rocks. This seems counterintuitive because we’re introducing things into the system that are less ditchable. But by having those fixed points, you will have an enhanced ability to make changes to your plans in the moment.

The Third Pillar of Ditchability: MIT’s

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If Big Rocks are the weekly incarnations of Horizons 3–5, then the daily incarnations are what I call the Most Important Things – MITs — for the day. On a daily basis, you simply decide what are the 1-3 Most Important Things to get done that day. You should not identify more than three of these; it’s best if you can narrow it down to just one.

MITs have even lower ditchability than the Big Rocks. You might conceivably shift a Big Rock to later in the week because that is the time scale on which Big Rocks are identified; but an MIT is attached to that day. These are the ditchable items of last resort.

The best approach to handling MITs is to identify them before the day starts, or at the very beginning, and then knock at least one of them out before anything else happens in the day. This will give you a sense of accomplishment and freedom, and it makes it less likely that it will get caught up in the backdraft of an unforeseen event that throws the day into chaos. But if the latter happens, and the MIT still isn’t done at the time, you will have a clear sense of the distinguished priority of that one thing, and it signals that you should strive to complete it before the day is done, if humanly possible.

A ditchability-friendly system makes this distinction, between mere “stuff” that you can get done on a given day and the highest-priority items that you should or even must get done that day³.

Conclusion: Trusted systems

Many folks, especially academics in my experience, dismiss systematic approaches to life and work because they believe those systems will simply fall apart under pressure. What’s the point of doing GTD when life comes at you so often and unpredictably?

That’s not a bad question, if it’s not rhetorical. The answer, I think, is to understand that in a trustworthy system, plans are just “plans”, and we don’t expect life to be 100% compliant with them. Instead, you work within a coherent system that recognizes that some of these plans are more ditchable than others. In fact, that’s part of what being a “trusted system” means: I can trust this system to be of use in the ever-changing world of being a whole person.

Etc.

• Tools: Lately I’ve been feeling like I spend more time in the digital world than I do in the physical one, and I don’t like it. In 2026 I’d like to have a more embodied existence — thinking and acting with my senses in the physical world. This involves a shift to analog things, like vinyl records and shopping in person, and especially using paper. I’ve started using paper notebooks and pens for a large part of my approach to GTD, and I’ll be writing about that soon. Based on that, I highly recommend Leuchhterm1917 dotted notebooks and Pilot G2 0.5mm gel pens as well as my old standby, stacks of cheap Post-It notes.

• Music: Two of my favorite musicians, playing together back in the day — bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Manu Katche (who played with Peter Gabriel). This is what “groove” sounds like, and I was amazed to see Pino playing a 5-string fretless.

1. This is my own made-up term, obviously.

2. For example, if I have a one-hour time block for working on a grant proposal, I am giving myself permission to not grade, or think about grading, for that hour.

3. Some technical considerations are needed here. GTD makes a distinction between a task that is in the Next Actions list and a task that is on the calendar. Here, with MITs, I am referring to the former. Tasks that are on the calendar should be on the calendar only because they must be done on a given day, perhaps at a given time. I typically don’t include calendar items in MITs because they are just a given — they are part of the hard landscape with essentially zero ditchability. If they aren’t, then they probably don’t belong on the calendar. Although, sometimes I break this rule and others might do this all the time.