Doesn't this assume all your potential tasks fall in one category or lead to one big goal like an inportant client project or something? What happens if two sets of tasks are unrelated, like dealing with kids vs projects? How do you keep the todo list from having more than one task in this case?
I believe that most tasks can be characterized by three attributes: importance, size and urgency. Unfortunately, most people want immediate gratification, so they will tend to focus on small, urgent tasks so that they can get that immediate reward, even if they have other tasks to that are important, large but not yet urgent. By the time the important, large tasks become urgent, there frequently isn't enough time to do them properly, and they get rushed, with predictably unsatisfactory results. It's really hard to work on a task with a deadline a month away, when there's something that can be completed easily, that's due today.
I believe that the best way to solve this problem is to take those big, important problems and divide them into much smaller chunks, and then give them intermediate deadlines that will ensure that enough progress is made that when the final deadline approaches, you won't be facing a huge task that hasn't even been started.
Of course, this idea doesn't give you a free pass from exercising some self-discipline; you have to honor those intermediate deadlines and actually make some progress on those important, big problems.
