GTD

GTD is one of those things where someone has made an entire career out of coaching people on what could have been a blog post.

The GTD method consists of the following:

1. Capture. Identify all your "inboxes" where new tasks come from (Slack, E-mail, meetings, etc.) and create a system for capturing all of these tasks into a single place. Particularly focus on capturing everything that comes up in your mind throughout the day. The idea is by capturing everything and writing it down or putting it into some planning tools (Trello, Asana, etc.) you no longer need to worry about forgetting or remembering anything.
2. Clarify. When a new item comes in decide is it actionable? Can you complete it in five minutes? Then do it right away. Otherwise decide if this is unactionable (trash), should be kept as a reference, or put onto the backlog. Then review your collection of tasks and decide upon the [[next action]] and execute it.
3. Organize. Get everything into your personal calendar so you don't forget it.
4. Reflect. On a fixed interval (daily, weekly, monthly etc.) reflect on all of the items in your collection and cull them appropriately.

Upsides

• A lot of the advise is really excellent if you do not engage with the entire system, such as processing inboxes and getting everything written down into one place.

Downsides

• Time consuming review rituals detract from just working on a thing.
• GTD is definitely one of those things designed by an executive to manage executive type productivity issues and does not work very well when applied to creative activities that need more free form [[Deep Work]] type approaches.
• GTD really struggles with helping you prioritize. When I was trying out GTD, I frequently found myself getting lots of little things done every day. Respond to a slack message, write a quick e-mail, delegate some task. I checked off lots of things on my list every day. But the more difficult, time consuming projects slowly slipped further and further down my list. (This might be addressed in the updated version of the book)

External References

1. Allen, David. What is GTD <https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/>. Retrieved 23W07.

Linked References

• mind-mapping
  
  • Combine Mind Mapping with [[GTD]] as a process to really get all your ideas out that need to be added to your lists.
• minimal-ztd
  

  Minimal ZTD by Leo Babuata and outlined on the Zen Habits[1][] site is a solid approximation of what I took away from [[GTD]]:

• next-action
  

  The Next Action or Next Action Item is an idea that comes out of [[GTD]].

• personal-productivity-practices
  
  • [[The GTD Method]]