I don't understand that, at some point don't you just forfeit what you haven't done in a month or two and get back onto a manageable list? I mean keeping track of everything is a philosophy, but to the point where the vast majority of your system is just noise, what's the point?
> Noise is either a sound of too short a duration to be determined, like the report of a cannon; or else it is a confused mixture of many discordant sounds, like the rolling of thunder or the noise of the waves. Nevertheless, the difference between sound and noise is by no means precise. — Ganot
At record time, don't know what is signal and what is noise. Separation of signal from noise is not persistence problem, it is presentation problem. Model is sophisticated: number of delays against action intended time, etc. flow into whether task is noise. Being in list is protection against amnesia but not protection against prioritization.
Noise is good. There's nothing wrong with noise. Internet is noise. You only need a good search engine or discovering technique. For Org users there are plenty of different choices - Org-Roam and org-roam-ui; built-in org-agenda, tags and todo stickers; Denote; Khoj, plain grepping, etc.
This is why I don't let my to-do lists automatically roll over. If it wasn't important enough to copy to today's to-do list, then maybe it's okay if it's never done. But I do keep them around in some form, because maybe the old to-do items had some interesting ideas associated with them that I might want to re-visit later. Or keep the 'cool ideas' and 'tasks to take action on said cool ideas' separate.
https://www.nuke24.net/docs/2024/202410-to-do-lists.html