Case study · Follow-up · four weeks of parked items
What happened to everything I didn't pick
Eleven parked items, tracked for four weeks. Most of them never came back — and that turned out to be the useful finding.
A follow-up on the author's own parked lists across four weekly sessions. Counts are exact; conclusions are personal, not clinical.
The fear about parking things
The most common objection to cutting a list to three is that the rest will rot. Something important will be forgotten, a deadline will be missed, and the whole method will have cost more than it saved.
So the parked items were tracked instead of trusted. Every item that lost its comparisons was written down and revisited at the end of each week.
The pattern that showed up
A small number of parked items came back and won immediately in the next session — those were genuinely timing problems, not priority problems.
A much larger group lost again, week after week. An item that loses every comparison for a month is telling you something a to-do list never will: it was never a priority, it was an obligation you had not yet declined.