This posting prompted me to reread a chapter out of RFA last night on long term goals - and this also ties in nicely the the "big vs. little" discussion that is going on now. In chpt. 48, DA has a good description of the difference between "somedaymaybe" and "long-term". Here are a couple quotes.

"There's a subtle but critical diference between something that is long term and something in the category of "someday/maybe". Either a project is an open loop to close, as soon as possible, or it is not. "As soon as possible" may be seven years, but it is still "as soon as possible." An if it's an open loop to close, there is a next action on it that must be determined before any progress will take place. "As soon as possible" turns into "never" unless next physical-action steps are determined. And no matter away a goal may be, there is somethign that can be done toward it immediately, if you're sincere about it." "Short term deliverables about the long-term goals are a critical motivating factor, and ral next actions that we can actually do wtihin the next few hours or days galvanize the inspiration."
I'm not sure if this is what is being suggested by anyone, but based on this line of thinking, it is probably not wise to contiually move real projects back and forth from from your projects list to someday/maybe based on your ability to be able to deal with it in the near term or tuck an NA away somewhere to look at later because you can't get to it this week. For me, a better question ask in the weekly review than, "can I deal with this this week", would be "is this moving along quickly enough, do I need to figure out a way to make NAs related to this project happen sooner."

My fear, at least for myself, that if my all NA's for all my projects aren't out on the table for me to see, I'm then hiding from what I'm really responsible for and it makes it easy for me to overcommit (which is I have a major tendancy to do).

I do think though, that context lists need to be kept fresh (I keep thinking about an issue of Seinfeld in which he said the "crisper" in the fridge should be called the "rotter" because that is where you put the veggies to rot I realized last week that I had a context that was a "rotter" and not a "crisper" so I quickly got rid of it - almost everything that was moved out of that context is now done.) What I'm seing is that the nature of my job (many meetings, many very long term projects with completion dates 2 years away), requires that I take more responsibility for leaving space in my schedule to periodically take care of these less urgent, but still important NAs.