Right now I’m dreaming about a GTD-style system with an extra layer.  Instead of saying “Item 123 must be done by [date]”, I want to be able to say “One of the highest priority/most urgent items in bucket A must be completed by [date]; pick whichever works best”.  Each of the items in bucket A could still have their own due dates and priorities, but the entire bucket can be treated as a recurring todo item.

I also want to be able to schedule that N unspecified items from a named bucket should be completed weekly.

Example 1: I have a list of products and services to review on my blog.  Some of those are more urgent or more important than others, but many of them are in equivalence classes and I could do any one of three, say, on any given date.  But I must do one a week.

Example 2: I have loads of front end items, backend items, marketing items, HR items, etc to do for my startup.  I’d like to be able to prioritize the buckets and then just schedule myself to “Do at least N items from this bucket and M items from that bucket per week”.

Example 3: irregular house maintenance items should be done “once in a while”.  Ideally I could set some sort of “don’t repeat before” date when I complete each one, and then say “do one irregular maintenance chore per month if the bucket is not empty”.

Does this sort of todo list system exist?  Many GTD systems allow you to put things in buckets, but you can’t schedule buckets as recurring obligations without kludging things in difficult-to-maintain ways.  Right now I’ve completely given up on them and just use some combination of GQueues and Evernote to do it all manually.  Not quite cutting it.