GTD in 15 minutes – A Pragmatic Guide
to Getting Things Done
Table of contents
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What is “GTD”?
The “in” list
Processing the “in” list
The “next actions” list
The “waiting for” list
Projects
Contexts
o Agenda contexts
The “someday/maybe” list
Calendar
Weekly review
o Trigger lists
Getting it to work
Tools
o Read/review folder
o Tickler file
About this guide
What is “GTD”?
GTD—or “Getting things done”—is a framework created by David
Allen for organizing and tracking your tasks and projects. Its aim is a
bit higher than just “getting things done”, though. (It should have been
called “Getting things done in a much better way than just letting
things happen, which often turns out not to be very cool at all”.) Its
aim is to make you have 100% trust in a system for collecting tasks,
ideas, and projects—both vague things like “invent greatest thing
ever” and concrete things like “call Ada 25 August to discuss
conference schedule”. Everything!
Sound like all other run-of-the-mill to-do list systems, you say? Well
in many ways it is, but there is more to it, and it’s really simple.
Promise! So please read on.
One of the basic assumptions of GTD is that you are dumb—or,
rather, that your subconsciousness is quite dumb when it comes to
thinking about things you should do. For example knowing you need
to get your watch repaired, but instead of reminding you when you
actually bike past the watch store, it implants an incessant feeling of “I
need to remember … something” in your brain.
Jessica Kerr put it perfectly:
Pretend your brain is a white board. Is it covered with to-do lists and “DO NOT
ERASE”? Is there space for drawing and combining ideas?
A great part of the “magic” is to convert both tasks and whims
into physical and visible actions as you soon will see.
What GTD gives you—when understood and implemented properly—
is a foolproof system for keeping track of what you need to do, should
do, or should consider to do. When your system and your trust in your
system is in place, your subconsciousness will stop keeping track of
all the things you need to do and stop constantly reminding you. This
reduces stress and frees up precious brain time to more productive
thinking—maybe it even saves real time so that you have more time
for ballet lessons, painting classes, and roller-blading.
Awesome! So how does it actually work? It works by using
special yoga techniques and daily mental exercises. No, haha! Just
kidding. It works by simply maintaining lists, which every kid with
paper and a pencil can do. Even computers can maintain lists these
days!
You will have to make the following lists:
1. In
2. Next actions (probably several – more on
that later)
3. Waiting for
4. Projects
5. Someday/maybe
These lists will be reviewed regularly and form the backbone of the
GTD system. Their workings are described below. In addition to the
lists you will need a calendar which lets you write down date- and
time-sensitive tasks and events.
The “in” list
The in list is where you capture ideas and tasks as they occur to you.
This can be your boss telling you to bake her a carrot cake, or seeing a
poster for a circus you want to see. The barrier for adding something
to your in list should be as low as possible—jot it down in a notebook
or press the right buttons on your smartphone. While I have called
it the in list, it is no problem to have more than one. Maybe an app for
when you are in front of a computer and a notebook for when you
loiter outside the mall? The important thing is that you are able to
write down things as they occur to you. We want to offload work from
the brain, remember?
When you first start to use GTD you should take an hour to write
down all things you want to—or have to—do. These so-called open
loops include all things that aren’t as they should be, where they
should be, and so on. Do you need to replace your toothbrush? Return
the tea cup you borrowed from your aunt? Should you repaint your
bed in another colour? All these things should go on your in list.
Processing the “in” list
If you have just started to use GTD and collected tonnes of items in
your in list during the initial “brain-emptying”, processing can take a
while. From now on the in list will be processed continuously.
The items on your in list should be processed one by one in the order
they appear on your list. When processing an item in your in list the
first question you need to ask is: is it actionable?—in other words, do
you need to do something? If the answer is NO, you either throw it
away if you no longer need it, keep it as reference material (“I will
probably need this article again some day…”), add it to a some
day/maybe list (for things like “learn Indonesian”), or incubate it.
Wait, what‽ Sit on it? Yes, sort of. If it’s something that you want to
remind yourself about later (“I really didn’t understand this article, I
should have a look at it again in two weeks”) it should go into your
calendar or your tickler file which will soon be explained. (Yes, even
the weird name.)
Now, if the item you’re currently processing is actionable—in other
words: something should be done about it—you should ask the
question “what is the next action?” The next action needs to be
a physical and visible action. In other words, not “plan cake lottery”,
but “e-mail Arthur and Camille and remind them to bake their cakes”.
This very thing—that a next action should be the next physical,
visible action to move the project closer to its goal—is
perhaps the most important “rule” in GTD. By using a few extra
seconds to come up with what physically needs to be done, you make
sure that your “next action” lists will only contain the things you can
choose to do at any moment. The “pre-processing” has already been
done (the actions themselves may very well be planning tasks, though)
and this greatly lowers the resistance to do the things.
When you have determined the next action, you should consider if it
takes less than two minutes to do it. If this is the case: do it. Right
away. (Things like “e-mail funny cat video to grandma”.) The reason
for this is simple: if the action takes two minutes or less, the overhead
of tracking it will be large compared to how long it takes to just do it.
If it does take more than two minutes you should delegate it if
appropriate—noting what was delegated, and when—on a waiting
for list, or add it to your own next actions list of things you want to do
as soon as you have the time and energy. Unless your secret
superpower is delegation, next actions is probably where most things
will end up. If the open loop will take more than one action to close,
the overall goal should also be noted on a projects list which will be
explained in a few sections.
To summarize, when processing your in list(s), you should follow this
procedure:
The GTD workflow: open loops are collected in the in list, processed,
and—if it’s an action—it’s done immediately, deferred, or delegated.
If the item being processed require more than one action it’s recorded
in the projects list as well.
The “next actions” list
So what’s the next actions list? Well, uh… a list of your next actions,
obviously. Another name for these actions is “as-soon-as-possible
actions”—it is simply those things from which you will pick what to
work on when you are not watching funny cat videos on YouTube or
playing Candy Crush Saga.
The “waiting for” list.
When you delegate work to others, send an e-mail you expect (or
need) a reply to, order something, or have a task that is “blocked”
because you are waiting for someone else to do something, it should
be written down on your waiting for list. These items should always be
marked with the current date so that you’ll be able to e-mail your coworker Marvin and say “I’m still waiting for the WTF report you said
you’d finish within a month. That was 32 days ago!”.
Projects
If you’re still with me you might be worried about the fact that
a “research artificial intelligence textbooks” action on your next
actions list is all that is written down about your plan to take over the
world. Wouldn’t it be easy to lose track once that action is done and
erased from your list? Yes, it kinda would. That’s where
the projects list comes in.
GTD’s definition of a project is very broad. It defines any objective
that requires more than one action to complete as a project. These
projects should go on your projects list. This list is simply a list of
project titles and—if you like—descriptions and intended outcomes of
the projects. When reviewing the projects list, you will make sure that
there is always at least one action on your next actions list for each
project, thus making sure that your projects make progress and aren’t
forgotten.
Contexts
Contexts are “tags” you put on the items on your next actions lists
saying where the action can be done, or what equipment you need to
perform it. An action can be “tagged” with a context in several ways;
the easiest is probably to simply have different next actions lists—one
for each context. If you use a newfangled electronic list manager you
can often have a “smart” lists for each tag—yielding the same result.
(With so-called smartphones it’s probably even possible to use its
location awareness to only present actions whose context match your
current location. If so: that is amazing! We live in the future!)
It is common to prefix contexts with an ‘@’ which makes sense when
the context is a location, but should just be thought of as a notation in
other cases. Examples of contexts are @ home, @ computer,
and @ office.
Examples of actions and their contexts
Action
Context
Buy more rainbow-coloured dog food
@ city or @ store
Browse cuteoverload.com
@ computer or @ the world wide webs
Smile to a stranger
@ everywhere
How many contexts you need depend on how many next actions you
will have and how your work day looks like. The important thing is to
be able to assess—at a glance—what your possible actions are
depending on where you physically are and what equipment you have
available. It can also be a good idea to make an “everywhere” context
for things you can do no matter where you are (“Call mum to discuss
Iceland trip”).
Agenda contexts
If you have regular meetings with people, it can be beneficial to have
“agenda contexts”—one for each person—where you note down the
things you want to talk about during the next meeting as you think of
them. For example, if you have a weekly meeting with Foobert, you
might consider having a “@ Foobert Agenda” context. These contexts
will of course change as your team/managers/supervisors, etc. change.
The “someday/maybe” list
You don’t want to lose your million-dollar idea of making a “jump to
conclusions” mat, but since this is a project, you want to realize when
you have more time, you don’t want to have it “pollute” your next
actions lists or your list of projects either. (Remember that the next
actions only contain the things that should be done as soon as possible
and that your projects list will be reviewed regularly to make sure that
all projects have at least one next action.)
This is where the someday/maybe list comes it. This list simply
contains ideas and projects you might want to realize at some time in
the future. This is where both “replace ugly painting in
bedroom” and “start a cult” should go. (Assuming—of course—that
you don’t want to do either of those things right now.) This list should
be reviewed weekly along with the rest of the system as described in
the weekly review section below.
Calendar
The calendar is for things you must do on a certain date or at a
certain time—and nothing else! That’s right; no putting “install
Bonzibudddy” on your calendar for next Wednesday if you
just think you want to have it done then.
But… why‽
By only having items that really are time and date sensitive on
your calendar it will be more useful, since it will actually tell you the
things you have to do a certain day without being “diluted” with other
items. The thing you want to do, but that doesn’t need to be done at a
certain time will be on your next actions list anyway, so you will be
reminded about it and have the chance to do it.
Weekly review
David Allen’s book on GTD calls the weekly review a “critical factor
for success” and he is not joking. If you start using the GTD
framework and you are not a robot, things will start to slip. You will
complete the next action of a project and forget to add a new “next
action” for that project. You will forget to remove next actions that
you—if you really thought about it—know that you won’t do in the
near future after all, and so on.
The weekly review should be done—you guessed it—once per week. It
will take a while, so you should ideally set off some time (probably at
least 30 minutes) in advance, for example Friday or Sunday
afternoons. When doing the weekly review you should at least do the
following:
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Make sure each project has at least one next
action.
Make sure that each action on your next
actions list is something you want or need
to do if you have the time during the
coming week. If not, move it (and/or the
project it belongs to) to
your someday/maybe list or—if you don’t
think you will ever do it—remove it
completely. (Be honest with yourself.)
Look through your someday/maybe list and
see if some projects/actions should be
moved to the list of current
projects/the next actions list. (If you’re
adding a new project on your projects list,
make sure to figure out its next physical,
visible action and put it on the next
actions list as well.)
Trigger lists
When doing the weekly review, it can be a good idea to work through
a “trigger list”. A trigger list is simply a list of key words to “trigger”
your brain to remember any open loops you still haven’t captured in
your system. A trigger list could look like the following:
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Boss
Co-workers
Projects started, not completed
Projects that need to be started
People I need to get back to
…
When working through your trigger list, put anything that you
remember in your in list to be processed afterwards.
An example of a trigger list can be seen at Lifehacker’s trigger list for
students. You probably want to customize your own list as you get
more experience and learn what works best for you.
Getting it to work
To get your GTD system to work there are some important “best
practices” you are advised to follow. As you start getting comfortable
with using GTD you can be a bit more lenient if you believe that it
would be better.
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It is important that you have hard
edges between your lists. If you often find
yourself wondering which context a next
action belongs to you might want to
reconsider your contexts.
Your tools should be fun to use—but
not too fun(!). If you have a slow and
complicated tool for managing your lists
you will subconsciously resist collecting
small tasks, and if your tool is too fun to
use you will end up over-using it and spend
time playing with its amazing features. Find
something that works for you.
Tools
The read/review folder and tickler file are two tools which—while
they aren’t directly part of the GTD method—may be beneficial to use
together with GTD.
Read/review folder.
You will probably have quite a few “read [some document]” actions
on your next actions list. A read/review folder is simply a folder
(physical or digital) that contains the papers, documents, and anything
else you want to read. The idea is to have this material available
whenever you have a few minutes to kill. In the dentist’s waiting
room? Waiting for your food at a café? Both are perfect opportunities
to peruse the paper on Periophthalmus modestus phylogeny or pretend
to read the memo from your boss!
It is important to have “sharp edges” here, too. Only the things you
want to read when you have the time should be put in this folder so
that you actually will pick it up during those little windows of free
time that show up during the day.
Tickler file
This strangely named concept is simply a collection of 43
(physical) file folders. Why 43? Because that means that you can have
one for each of the 31 days of a month plus one for each of
the 12 months of the year. If you’re reaching for your calculator
now—just trust me on the number 43.
So, what are these folders used for? The idea is that you can place
physical items you will need on a specific day (tickets for the concert),
reminders of things you possibly want do on a specific date
(remember, the calendar is only for things that have to be done on a
specific date/time), or the notes from the lecture you didn’t really
understand (“I will want to review these in a week when my
subconsciousness has chewed on it for a while”).
Every day when you get up, you open the folder with the current date.
You then pocket your concert tickets, decide that you do want to take
the dog to the dog hairdresser today, but push the lecture notes back
three days since you don’t have time right now. Having emptied the
folder, you place it in the back, bringing tomorrow’s folder to the
front. At the end of each month, you open the folder for the new
month and deal with its contents—like putting items in the correct day
folders.
The tickler file thus provides a way to send yourself reminders in the
future—tickling your memory. A-ha!
About this guide
This guide was written to serve as a simple, pragmatic guide to the
“getting things done” method. This run-through of the GTD method is
meant to be brief. It’s written from one person’s perspective and other
people would probably assess the importance of different aspects of
GTD differently.
If you want a complete overview of GTD you would be wise to read
David Allen’s book which formalized the method he
developed: “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free
Productivity” (Amazon
, Kindle Store
, Bookdepository, Google Books, Wikipedia).
The guide’s visual style was inspired by Miran Lipovača’s excellent
guide to the Haskell programming language “Learn You a Haskell for
Great Good!”.
The guide is written in Markdown and I use pandoc to generate
HTML. To get in touch with me, send me an email to
erlendαhamberg.no.
This guide will show you how to set up Workflowy to run the GTD system.
GTD or 'getting things done' is a method developed by business consultant
David Allen in 2001.
Background of the GTD method
The gtd method is a system for capturing, organizing, and processing
tasks. One of the key ideas promoted by the method is to capture all tasks,
pieces of information, and issues as soon as possible to avoid depending
on one's memory. A second key idea promoted in GTD is to break down
tasks or projects into actionable steps to remove friction when deciding
what to do next to advance a goal.
The popularity of the GTD system peaked around 2007 according to google
search trends. However, as it was one of the first productivity methods to
achieve global fame it has become a mainstay in the productivity space.
How the GTD system works
It's important for us to have a general idea of how the system is supposed
to work before we attempt to implement it in Workflowy.
Let's start with a getting things done flowchart that shows the general flow
of information through the system.
1. Capturing
Starting from the top of the diagram, you can see that new pieces of
information start at the Inbox. Whenever you have an idea, a todo,
something you want to remember, or some other piece of information that
you want to remember, it goes in the inbox. Don't think about it too much,
the whole point is just to capture everything and stop depending on your
memory to remind you about it.
2. Clarifying
Now you'll want to review the items in your inbox. You should aim to do
this daily so your items don't build up. For each item in your inbox you'll
ask yourself a series of questions to help you figure out where it should go
in your system.
Is it actionable?
Is it something you can do or is it more or a vague idea or a random piece
of information? If it's not actionable, it could go in one of three places.
If it's a piece of information you want to keep for the future, putting it in a
'reference' section is a good idea. If it's a project that could have concrete
steps but you're not going to do it anytime soon, put it in a 'Someday'
section you can check from time to time. And finally, you can also just
trash anything that doesn't belong in your system.
Can you complete it in a single step?
Basically, is it something that's simple enough where it'll only take a single
step to complete. If it's going to take multiple steps, we'll consider it a
'Projects'. Projects can be any size not just really complicated multi-step
things.
When you've decided something is a project, you'll need to figure out what
the next actionable step in that project is and put it in the 'Next',
'Calendar', or 'Delegate' sections. Otherwise you run the risk of leaving it
in the 'Projects' section and forgetting about it - so make sure if
something is a project, you also figure out the first actionable and put it in
the right place.
'Next' is like a todo list where you'll be working from daily. 'Calendar' is
where you'll put items that you want to do or need to do at a future date.
'Delegate' is where you'll put things that you need someone else to do.
If you delegate an item, make sure to tag or mark it somehow so you
know who is responsible for it and when you delegated it.
Will it take less than two minutes?
If it'll take longer than two minutes, then it will go in 'Next', 'Calendar', or
'Delegate'.
And finally, if you answered 'Yes' to all three questions - it's actionable, it's
a single step, and it'll take less than two minutes, you do it now. Don't put
if off for later, don't add it to you 'Next' list, just get it over with right now.
It's not worth the effort of putting it into your system.
3. Organize
The next step is to organize your tasks. While GTD describes this as a
separate activity, you'll likely be doing this at the same time as you clarify.
One thing we can do to further organize the items we've generated from
the clarify step is to go through the 'Next' list and either tag items or
group them by a specific context.
By that we mean grouping items based on things like when or where you
can complete those tasks. For example you could group all your work tasks
and your personal tasks. It doesn't make sense to have those mixed
together because you won't be completing work tasks when you're at
home and you won't be completing personal tasks when you're at work. So
to simplify and narrow down your list of next actions, it makes sense to
group them so you can complete them one after the other if the context is
right.
You could also tag items based on who else needs to be present to
complete them if they're part of a project for example or you're working
with a client. That way you can filter items tagged with that person's name
when you're with them, say in a meeting, and quickly know what to discuss
or work on together.
If you put any items into the 'Calendar' or 'Delegate' sections that you
didn't either give a date to or haven't figured out who to assign to - this is
the time to figure that out.
4. Review
At least once a week, you should review the different sections you have in
your gtd system. The point of this is to make sure the system is working
correctly, make any adjustments based on your needs or any issues you
might be having, and most importantly that you're actually doing the right
things. Getting things done is a productivity system, but if you're not doing
the right things, it doesn't matter how efficient you are at executing them.
As you review your lists, you'll likely be coming up with a lot of new items
that'll go into your inbox. You should go through steps 1 - 3 after you've
added all the new items so they're sorted and organized for the coming
week.
Next you'll want to review your 'Calendar' for any items that might
generate new items for your inbox. Make sure to check both recent past
dates and upcoming dates.
You'll also review your 'Next' section to make sure you've removed or
crossed off any complete items.
Review any items you've delegated and create new items to follow up with
the person, call, email, or schedule a meeting if necessary. Basically, an
item to remind you to check in with that person.
Next, take a look at your 'Projects' list and make sure each project you're
actively working on has one item in the 'Next' section.
Finally, you'll want to review your 'Someday' section and see if there's
anything in there that you want to either turn into a project or maybe get
rid of altogether.
5. Engage
This is the step where you're actually completing tasks from your gtd
system and what you'll be doing most of the time you're working with the
method.
The way you do that is by first checking your 'Calendar' for any time /
date-sensitive activities you have to do for the day. Once you're done with
that, you'll move on to the 'Next' section, filter by the appropriate context
and get down to business.
As you work and new items come in, you'll drop them in your inbox and
clarify and organize them later, usually at the end of the day.
How to do GTD in Workflowy
Now that we've gone over how the gtd system works, we'll show you how
to implement it in Workflowy. The structure itself is very simple, the most
important thing is to understand the process of how items get into the
system, how they're organized, and how the different lists interact with
each other.
Let's start by creating a bullet to hold our system, and we'll also go ahead
and add the main sections we'll need.
Now let's add a couple of items to our 'Inbox' and go through how each
one would be organized.
So now we'll go through each one and mentally ask ourselves the three
questions from the 'Clarifying' step.
1. Is it actionable?
2. Can you complete it in a single step?
3. Will it take less than two minutes?
We have one item that doesn't pass the first question - we have a url
'https://reallygoodemails.com/'. It is something we want to keep for the
future so we'll put in in our 'Reference' section under a new section we'll
name 'Useful websites'.
Next, we have a couple of items that are definitely multi-step, so let's add
those under the 'Projects' section.
And lastly we have a couple of items that are going to take longer than 2
minutes.
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Call accountant to discuss deductions
Change car oil
Let's put 'Call accountant to discuss deductions' in our calendar and
schedule it for Monday. We'll also move 'Change car oil' to the 'Next'
section.
Great, that leaves us with only one item that we should do right now and
that's taking out the trash. After we've done that let's go back and do a bit
of organization.
We have several items that are multi-step so let's see if we can't group
those by context and then figure out what the next actions are for each
one.
So we've split these projects into 'Personal' and 'Work' to make it easier
to focus on the right projects depending on which context we find
ourselves in.
We can now put those next actions in our 'Next' section, the 'Calendar',
or the 'Delegate' section if necessary. But instead of just copying them,
we'll user Workflowy's 'Live copy' feature. That lets us create a copy that
will update anywhere we paste it - so we don't have to go back and update
it in multiple places.
To create a live copy, you can either use the bullet menu of the item you
can't to copy and select 'Mirror (Live copy)'. Now you can paste the copy
into the 'Next' section. You'll notice how instead of a bullet icon for the
item, we now have a diamond. That lets us know it's a live copy. If you
open the bullet menu for a live copy, you'll see an option to view all the
copies and where they're located.
Our 'Next' section should now look like this.
As you can see, there are now all kinds of things in our 'Next' section.
Some of them are for work, some personal and some we can't really do
anywhere but a grocery store or a car shop.
We can again group these by context or with tags if you prefer. An
example of what that would look like with tags is this.
And if you prefer to group them, this is how that could look.
We also have one item that we need to delegate, 'Get sales figures from
Matt'. The way our 'Delegate' section work is that an item that needs to
be delegated has two parts. We need an item in our 'Next' section for us
to actually delegate the task. That might be writing an email, making a call,
or sending physically telling someone, but we need to remember to do it.
Next we need a way to track that we've asked someone to do something
so we can check up with them periodically until the task is done. So what
we'll do for this item is add our task in the 'Next' section, and leave it
under 'Delegate'. Once we've actually delegated it and the other person
knows it's their responsibility we'll move the item from 'Delegate' and
either tag it as '#waiting' or put it under a new section also called
'Waiting'.
The reason we tag or put it under a new section is so we can keep track of
this that need to be delegated and those that we've already delegated and
are just waiting on someone else to complete.
You should also add the date and the name of the person you delegate
items to in order to keep track of when things are overdue and you might
need to remind the person.
Some nitty-gritty details
Let's go over some details when using the gtd system in Workflowy.
Completing items
When completing items, you actually have three options - which you use is
up to you.
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Crossing off complete items
Tagging complete items, for example with
Nesting complete items in an archive
While crossing items off is the most straightforward way to do it, it's not
the only way and not everyone likes the visual appearance of crossed of
items.
The calendar section
You'll notice in our example of the calendar section, only the item that
needed a date tag had one. We didn't have a complete list of all the days
for the month. While you can certainly create date tags for each day, it's
likely you'll still use another dedicated calendar application to keep track of
events. So in this example we opted to keep things as simple as possible.
Instead, what we can do to make our calendar more useful is to create a
custom starred search by:
1. Zooming into our 'Calendar' section
2. Performing a search for 'today - 14 days'
3. Starring that search
What we have now is a custom search that will always show us any items
with a date tag within the date range starting from the current day and
going out 14 days. As long as we're putting items into our calendar with a
date tag, our custom search will let us easily stay on top of those items.
Conclusion
Setting up and using the getting things done system is not as complicated
as it might first seem. There's definitely a bit of work to be done as you
start using the system and getting used to the new process. However, the
benefit of clearing out your mind of the million and one things fighting for
your attention is well worth the time and effort of maintaining the system.
As long as you get into the habit of following the steps you'll be well on
your way to success:
1. Capturing everything
2. Clarifying each item
3. Organizing items into the right section
4. Reviewing the system at least each week
5. Engaging daily