Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. - David Allen

Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list that you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. ...[A]s soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it... in your short-term memory... part of you... thinks that you should be doing it all the time. ...[Y]ou've created instant and automatic stress and failure ...

It is a tricky business to know when you should set goals and objectives in order to achieve a focus, and when you would be better off dealing with the acceptance and management of your current reality so you can later step into new directions and responsibilities with greater stability and clarity. Only you will know the answer to that, and only in the moment.

[A]nything that is held only in "psychic RAM" will take up either more or less attention than it actually deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.