A personal productivity system has reached the point at which maintaining it consumes more time than the work it was built to organise.

The user spends approximately nine hours a week on a framework designed to save four.

“It’s an investment,” said practitioner Émile Ravenscroft, tagging a task. “Once it’s set up properly, it runs itself.”

The system comprises eleven categories, four priority levels, a colour scheme, and a weekly review that has been postponed since April. It contains 1,340 items, of which nine are active and 1,331 are described by Ravenscroft as context.

The Institute for Organised Delay reports that such systems reliably outgrow their purpose within four months.

“Building the system is enjoyable,” said Dr. Marisol Ffoulkes. “The work is not. Given a choice between doing the task and improving the machinery for tracking the task, the machinery wins every time, and can be described afterwards as progress.”

Ravenscroft has migrated the system between applications three times this year, each migration taking a weekend and producing, by his own assessment, a slightly worse arrangement.

He is currently evaluating a fourth application. Its principal advantage is that he has not yet failed to use it.