Get It Done

GTD is David Allen's method, set out in his book Getting Things Done (2001, revised 2015). Getting Things Done and GTD are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company, and this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by it. What follows is how the five stages named in the revised edition line up with the controls above.

Capture. One box for everything, so you stop using your head as a storage device. The capture field at the top writes straight to the inbox and asks no questions.

Clarify. Each inbox item gets one decision. Is it actionable? If not it is reference or it is deleted. If it is, and it takes more than one step, it is a project, and the project needs a next action written as a physical thing you could start now.

Organize. The lists here are the standard ones: next actions, projects, waiting for, scheduled, someday, reference. The point is not the names. The point is that you can find everything you deferred without rereading it all.

Reflect. The weekly review is the part people skip, and skipping it is what makes the system quietly stop being trustworthy. The stepper walks the lists in order so it takes 20 minutes instead of an afternoon.

Engage. Pick from the next actions list and work. If you want a timer around that, the pomodoro timer takes a task id from the Focus button on any next action.

The six steps are in the order they are for a reason: the inbox first, because deciding what things are is the work everything else depends on, and the week last, because you cannot choose sensibly until the lists are true. Run them in order and resist tidying as you go. A review that turns into an afternoon of reorganising is a review you will skip next week.

The projects step is the one that repays the time. It marks each project as having a next action or not, matched by name, and gives you a box to write the missing one straight into next actions with the project already attached. A project with no next action is the usual reason a commitment quietly stops moving, and this is where it becomes visible rather than in the middle of a busy Tuesday.

The overdue and stalled step gathers anything past its date together with any next action created more than a fortnight ago and still open. Age is not a crime, but two weeks without movement usually means the item is not really a next action, is blocked by something you have not written down, or is not something you are going to do. Reschedule it, move it to waiting or someday, or delete it, and the counter at the top only updates when you reach the end and press Finish.