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About Getting Things Done

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Gettings Things Done (GTD)

Getting Things Done (we'll call it GTD for short) is strategy for time management and productivity developed by David Allen, originally publicised by the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

In a nutshell, you practise GTD by collecting your thoughts when they occur, process them at a time your choosing, and get on performing the next action that you need to do in your current situation.

Unwanted Thoughts = Stress

Juggling competing thoughts in our minds as we try to get things done is a major causes of stress. It is hard to focus on what we should get done right now because new commitments, information and ideas continue to be delivered to us face-to-face, via email, phone, while reading or doing just about anything else.

We try to remember these things as they occur, and we might even start to plan our response in our heads. At best, we are only distracted while we decide what to do. At worst, we are too busy deal with the issue and it becomes something constantly lurking in the back our mind, until we ultimately forget it when it would have been useful.

Clear your Head; Collect your Thoughts

Thinking our thoughts through completely when we have them is too distracting, but not doing anything causes an ongoing distraction and the risk we might forget the thought. A core principle of GTD is that we have a trusted system that we use to record thoughts as they occur. The trusted system could be a notepad, a physical inbox, an email folder or My Web Brain.

Writing down your thought (only in the rawest possible form) somewhere you trust is a good solution. Distraction is minimised because you do not process the thought. You can return immediately to what you are doing, knowing that you will process the thought later at a time of your choosing.

Process your thoughts when you Choose

It takes some mental effort to shift gears between doing something and planning something else. Once you are in the planning mode, however, it is easy to make analytical decisions about a variety of issues at once.

A principle of GTD is that you regularly - but only as much as need to - set aside some time to process your collected thoughts. In GTD, you decide whether you thoughts should result in a next action in your part, are only important for reference of whether they represent something you might do in the future.

  • Next Actions are a single physical unit of work that you can just do, without subsequent planning. The next action of writing a report might be brainstorming. The next action for purchasing a gift might be asking a friend what the recipient might like. Next actions are easy to do, because they are just the next action.

    When you create a next action you also assign it to a context. A Context is the situation or environment in which you can carry out the action. Examples of context might include "at home", "at work", "shopping". Assigning a context means you only consider performing a next action when it is possible to perform the action.

    If you determine an action is likely to take less than 2 minutes to do, GTD suggest that you should immediately do it as you process the thought. This keeps the little tasks from requiring a disproportionate amount of overhead.

  • Someday/Maybe Items are thoughts and ideas that might suggest a course of action in future, but for now are not practical or achievable. When you create a Someday/Maybe item, you specify a tickle date to remind you of the idea later.
  • Reference Items are thoughts which you decide require no action on your part, but which you wish to remember regardless. A reference item could be a note that something happened on a particular date, or a receipt for an item you have bought. You do not need to do anything with reference items.

The activity of processing your thoughts involves thinking about each accumulated unprocessed thought and converting it to a next action, someday / maybe item or referene item.

Get on with your Next Actions

Once you have processed your thoughts you have a discrete list of simple next actions that do require you to think about what you need to do, just to go ahead and do it.

GTD does not describe how you should select which of your Next Actions should be performed first. Given the list of next actions, the human brain is easily capable of picking the next action based on the priority, due date, or age of a next action.

With the Next Action selected, you go ahead and perform the action required, and this is where GTD makes the difference in your focus and concentration. Thoughts now collected are no longer distracting. If any new thoughts occur to you during the process of performing the action, you can collect them in your trusted system for later processing and get back to the task at hand.

Once you complete a next action, you mark it complete and progress to the next. Having assigned a context to your actions means that the only actions you will be presented with are those that you can do in the current environment and circumstances, so you do not need to consider if you can do the next action.

And Repeat

Eventually (maybe at the end of the work day, or at lunch) you will return to your new unprocessed thoughts and process them. The timing of when you next process your thoughts is entirely dependent on your judgement about how often you need to do so. Once or twice a day is usually sufficient.

Once you have finished processing your thoughts again, you can get back to performing your next actions for your current context. This repeats indefinitely: Processing Thoughts and then performing next actions, always collecting new thoughts as they occur.

More to GTD

There is more to GTD than what is described here. But the above process is the core methodology behind Getting Things Done and is hopefully a useful starting point