Set a date – like a Sunday – to get comfy and dump everything out of your brain onto paper or your digital to-do list.Īfter this initial GTD start-up, this stage requires more maintenance than construction. Allen notes that he has seen this process take anywhere between one to six hours, so plan accordingly. This means everything – from the thought you had this morning when you noticed you ran out of garbage bags at home to the big department project that’s due next quarter. Starting with a large stack of printer paper (or scrap paper, or even a blank journal), write down every single thing that is pulling your attention. Allen shared an approach to your first round of collection that can be adapted for anyone. The first stage of GTD is to capture – or gather – everything that grabs your attention. Which is the first stage of getting things done? Allen even suggests reflecting at six different levels – or horizons – to build this perspective. With everything organized in the GTD system, you can build a better perspective on life. When your mind is cluttered with the minutiae, it’s difficult to focus on the overall vision. When it comes to perspective, GTD focuses less on big-picture goals and visions and more on minute details that often claim space in your brain. Utilizing the system to the fullest extent embodies the control principle. The two main principles of GTD are control and perspective. In order to close this loop, a GTD user must identify, clarify, and organize the thoughts, ideas, and tasks that come their way. GTD takes the open loop of your inbox and closes it by giving you a clear idea of what’s important and what can wait. Everything in it is open-ended until you make a decision on what action to take and when. This inbox you create can be digital, analog, or a combination of both. Organizing with GTD means pulling together every single thought, idea, and task that passes by your brain to create an ordered approach to all the actions needed to remove these items from your inbox. The goal of this article – and corresponding flowchart – is to equip you with everything you need to start getting things done.
We’d also recommend listening to the audiobook or reading the print version. While there are many adaptations of GTD available in both written and video form, this article delivers a clear breakdown of the main points in GTD so you can implement the system yourself. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your workload coupled with the multitude of digital tools at your disposal, this article shows you how the Getting Things Done (GTD) system can underpin your day-to-day in order to provide clarity, calm, and a sense of control over your workload. This simple understanding of a mind’s limit creates the foundation for the book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity from David Allen. If technology sparks so much workflow improvement, why do some people feel overwhelmed by our many tools? Aside from the obvious friction from switching between different tools to do your work, one other factor is the limit of our brains to hold information and turn it into action. There’s no shortage of articles and blog posts extolling how much more productive knowledge workers are when surrounded by digital tools.
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