GTD - Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen

Reading this book led me to Zettelkasten and Org Roam .

Mind like water

Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does. If it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear. If your mind is empty, it is ready to anything and open to everything.

Core of GTD

(1) capturing all the things that need to get done—now, later,someday, big, little, or in between—into a logical and trusted system outside of your head and off your mind; and (2) disciplining yourself to make front-end decisions about all of me “inputs” you let into your life so that you will always have a plan for “next actions” that you can implement or renegotiate at any moment.

or in other words

Describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for every problem or situation.

Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward.

Challenges in carrying out above two steps:

Most people have a resistance to initiating the burst of energy that it will take to clarify the real meaning, for them, of something they have let into their world, and to decide what they need to do about it.

Thinking in a concentrated manner to define desired outcomes is something few people feel they have to do. But in truth, outcome thinking is one of the most effective means available for making wishes reality.

You’ll be better equipped to undertake higher-focused thinking when your tools for handling the resulting actions for implementation are part of your ongoing operational style.

The Basic Requirements for Managing Commitments:

•Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, that you know you’ll come back to regularly and sort through. •Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it. •Third, once you’ve decided on all the actions you need to take,you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.

Stuff and its transformation to next action

“stuff”: anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step. once “stuff” comes into our lives and work, we have an inherent commitment to ourselves to define and clarify its meaning. That’s our responsibility as knowledge workers;once “stuff” is transformed and clear, our value, other than physical labor, would probably not be required.

Make intuitive choices based on options, instead of trying to think again about what those options are. We need to have thought about all of that options already and captured the results in a trusted way. Don’t waste time thinking about things more than once.

Horizontal and Vertical Action Management We control our commitments, projects, and actions in two ways — horizontally and vertically.

“Horizontal” control maintains coherence across all the activities in which we are involved

“Vertical” control, in contrast, manages thinking up and down the track of individual topics and projects. This is “project planning” in the broad sense. It’s focusing in on a single endeavor, situation, or person and fleshing out whatever ideas, details, priorities, and sequences of events may be required for you to handle it, at least for the moment.

RAM and Computer screen The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams with their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.

Cause of Stress Our mind has no sense of past or future.time. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pin-pointed.

The Five Stages of Mastering Workflow

Five stages that we go through as we deal with our horizontal part of work.

(1) collect things that command our attention; (2) process what they mean and what to do about them; (3) organize the results, which we (4) review as options for what we choose to (5) do.

The quality of our workflow management is only as good as the weakest link in this five-phase chain. I have discovered that one of the major reasons many people haven’t had a lot of success with “getting organized” is simply that they have tried to do all five phases at one time.I have found it very helpful, if not essential, to separate these stages as I move through my day. There are times when I want only to collect input and not decide what to do. Sometimes i go through the inventory of my work, or some portion of it. And obviously a lot of my time is spent merely doing something that I need to get done.

Collect

Three requirements to make the collection phase work: 1 Every open loop must be in your collection system and out of your head. 2 You must have as few collection buckets as you can get by with. 3 You must empty them regularly.

Process

For non-actionable items, the possible categories are trash,incubation tools, and reference storage.

For actionable items, think of the desired result and number of steps. If any desired result requires more than one action step, handle it as a part of project.

Two things need to be determined about each actionable item under Project: 1 What “project” or outcome have you committed to? and 2 What’s the next action required?

Once you’ve decided on the next action, you have three options: Do It, Delegate It, or Defer It.

Do It Now: Any action that takes less than 2 minutes must be done immediately.

Rest of the actions, go to Calendar or other tools to be tracked and done: a list of reminders of next actions (deferred items) a list of reminders of things you’re waiting for(delegated items)

Organize

Projects: All current projects must be tracked on a index page or master list. Every project must have a well defined finish lines or Outcome. All of the details, plans,and supporting information should be contained in separate file folders in the reference storage.

Calendar:

Only the following three things must go on a calendar: • time-specific actions (Appointments) • day-specific actions (no specific time, but day constrained like last day) • day-specific information(some useful information needed on that day)

Next actions List:

Any longer-than-two-minute, non-delegatable action you have identified needs to be tracked. If the list is long, sub-divide into categories based on tools i.e phone, email or place i.e office, home, shopping, or project names etc..

Incubation Systems:

Two kinds of “incubate” systems that could work for this kind of thing: “Someday/Maybe” lists and/or a “tickler” file. Some sub-categoriges •Movies •Songs •Books to read •Food to taste •Weekend trips to take •Things to do with the kids •Seminars/Events to attend

Tickler file: 43 folder systems i.e 31 for days of month and 12 the months.

Reference Material:

Topic- and area-specific storage reference files usually define themselves in terms of how they are stored. eg contracts by date, closed cases,projects etc.

General-Reference Filing is one that everyone needs close at hand for storing

ad hoc information that doesn’t belong in some predesignated category. Establishing a good working system for this category of material is critical to ensuring stress-free productivity; More of this in chapter 7.

Review

Review your lists i.e Next actions List and Calendar as often as you need to, to get them off your mind and finish them on the planned day. Review the whole picture of your life and work at appropriate intervals and appropriate levels. For most people the magic of workflow management is realized in the consistent use of the review phase.

The Weekly Review:

The more complete the system is, the more you’ll trust it.And the more you trust it, the more complete you’ll be motivated to keep it. The Weekly Review is a master key to maintaining that standard.

To ensure that your brain is clear and that all the loose strands of the past few days have been collected, processed, and organized. Hence, you’ll need to clean house once a week.

The Weekly Review is the time to • Gather and process all your “stuff.” • Review your system. • Update your lists. • Get clean, clear, current, and complete.

All of your open loops i.e projects, Next Actions, Calendar, Waiting For and Someday/Maybe lists should be reviewed once a week. Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation. Why?

Do

The basic purpose of this workflow-management process is to facilitate good choices about what you’re doing at any point in time. At 10:33 A.M. Monday, deciding what to do and what not to do, and feel good about both?

1.The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions at any Moment:

• Context (talk@phone,buy@shop,family@home, project/meet@office) • Time available (30 minute review in 10 mins) • Energy available (when tired handle email, then think learn or ideate) • Priority

2.The Threefold Model for Evaluating Daily Work - or activities engaged in:

• Doing predefined work (working as per todo/calendar) • Doing work as it shows up (unplanned surprises that you must do over others) • Defining your work (mail, meeting notes and projects to actionable steps)

3.The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work - perspectives define work

Similar to Altitude in aerospace, perspectives define work prioritires

• 50,000+ feet: Life - why do you exist? ultimate job description • 40,000 feet: Three to five year vision -strategies,trends,career and life • 30,000 feet: One to two year goals - things to accomplish or to have • 20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility - achieve results & maintain standards • 10,000 feet: Current projects - relatively short-term outcomes to achieve • Runway: Current actions - todo list, calendar & adhoc activities

The Five Phases of Project Planning

1 Defining purpose and principles - why, standards/values as boundaries 2 Outcome visioning - visualize what it’s likely to be 3 Brainstorming - resolve that “cognitive dissonance” - how to bridge gaps 4 Organizing - components, priorities, and/or sequences of events 5 Identifying next actions

Try out Now:

Choose one project for improvement. Think of your purpose. Think of what a successful outcome would look like: where would you be physically, financially, in terms of reputation, or whatever? Brainstorm potential steps. Organize your ideas. Decide on the next actions.

Are you any clearer about where you want to go and how to get there?

Need More Clarity? - go a level higher up from five to one Need More to Be Happening? - go a level down from one to five

The Basic Processing Tools

In addition to a desktop work space, you’ll need: •Paper-holding trays (at least three) •A stack of plain letter-size paper •A pen/pencil •Post-its (3X3s) •Paper clips •Binder clips •A stapler and staples •Scotch tape •Rubber bands •An automatic labeler •File folders •A calendar •Wastebasket/recycling bins

To make the whole system work without a hitch,you’ll need to have a lebeller at hand all the time, so you can file something whenever you want.

An Effictive Filing system

It should take you less than one minute to pick something up out of your in-basket or print it from e-mail, decide it needs no action but has some potential future value, and finish storing it in a trusted system. Filing should be fun and easy, current and complete.

One Alpha System I have one A—Z alphabetical filing system, not multiple

systems. People have a tendency to want to use their files as a personal organization system, and therefore they attempt to organize them by projects or areas of focus. This magnifies geometrically the number of places something isn’t when you forget where you filed it. One simple alpha system files everything by topic, project, person, or company, so it can be in only three or four places if you forget exactly where you put it.

Purge Your Files at Least Once a Year

“Incompletion Triggers” List

Professional Projects started, not completed Projects that need to be started Commitments/promises to others Boss/partners Colleagues Subordinates Other people in organization “Outside” people Customers Other organizations Professionals Communications to make/get , Internal/External Initiate or respond to: Phone calls Voice-mail E-mail Pages Faxes Letters Memos Other writing to finish/submit Reports Evaluations/reviews Proposals Articles Promotional materials Manuals/instructions Rewrites and edits Meetings that need to be set/requested Who needs to know about what decisions? Significant read/review Financial Cash flow Statistics Budgets Forecasts/projections P&Ls Balance sheet Credit line Planning/organizing Formal planning (goals, targets, objectives) Current projects (next stages) Upcoming projects Business/marketing plans Organizational initiatives Upcoming events Meetings Presentations Organizational structuring Changes in facilities Installation of new systems/equipment Travel Banks Receivables Payables Petty cash Administration Legal issues Insurance Personnel Policies/procedures Customers Internal External Marketing Promotion Sales Customer service Systems Phones Computers Office equipment Other equipment Utilities Filing Storage Inventories Supplies Office/site Office organization , Furniture Decorations Waiting for… Information Delegated tasks/projects Completions critical to projects Replies to: Letters Memos Calls Proposals Requisitions Reimbursements Petty cash Insurance Ordered items Items being repaired Tickets Decisions of others Professional development Training/seminars Things to learn Things to look up Skills to practice/learn especially re: computers Tape/video training Resumes Outside education Research— need to find out about… Professional wardrobe

Personal Projects started, not completed Projects that need to be started Commitments/promises to others Spouse Children Family Friends Professionals Borrowed items Projects: other organizations Service Civic Volunteer Communications to make/get Family Friends Professional Initiate or respond to: Phone calls Letters Cards Upcoming events Special occasions Birthdays Anniversaries Weddings Graduations Holidays . Travel Weekend trips Vacations Social events Cultural events Sporting events R&D— things to do Places to go People to meet/invite Local attractions Administration Financial Bills Banks Investments Loans Taxes Insurance Legal affairs Filing Waiting for. . . Mail order Repair Reimbursements Loaned items Medical data RSVPs Home/household Landlords Property ownership Legal Real estate Zoning Taxes Builders/contractors Heating/air-conditioning Plumbing Electricity Roofing Landscape Driveway Walls/floors/ceilings Decoration Furniture Utilities Appliances Lightbulbs/wiring Kitchen things Washer/dryer/vacuum Areas to organize/clean Computers Software Hardware Connections CD-ROM E-mail/Internet TV VCR Music/CDs/tapes Cameras/film Phones Answering machine Sports equipment Closets/clothes Garage/storage Vehicle repair/maintenance Tools Luggage Pets Health care Doctors Dentists Specialists Hobbies Books/records/tapes/disks Errands Hardware store Drugstore Market Bank Cleaner Stationer Community Neighborhood Schools Local government Civic issues

Processing Guidelines

• Process the top item first. • Process one item at a time. • Never put anything back into “in.”

Organizing

There are seven primary types of things that you’ll want to keep track of and manage from an organizational perspective: Projects list Project support material Calendared actions and information Next Actions lists Waiting For list Reference material Someday/Maybe list

The above seven must be kept visually, physically, and psychologically separate. It’s critical that all of these categories be kept pristinely distinct from one another.

Categorize Action Reminders

Over many years I have discovered that the best way to be reminded of an “as soon as I can” action is by the particular context required for that action that is, either the tool or the location or the person needed to complete it.

• “at phone” • “at Computer” • “Errands” • “at Office” • “at Home” • “Agendas” (for people and meetings) • “to read/Review” • “to thinkover”

Clear out your notes once they become inactive or unreal, to keep the whole system from catch- ing the “stale” virus. I’ve found a lot of value in capturing these types of thoughts, more for the way it consistently helps my thinking process. I end up not using most ideas, but they help in thinking and i remove it asap.

Organizing Non-actionable Data

One of the biggest problems in personal management systems is the blending of actionable things with a large amount of data and material that has value but no action attached.

The Power of the Collection Habit

When people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organize in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way.

The price people pay when they break agreements in the world is the disintegration of trust in the relationship—a negative consequence.

Not being aware of all you have to do is much like having a credit card for which you don’t know the balance or the limit—it’s a lot easier to be irresponsible.

choices for breaking agreement

• Don’t make the agreement. • Complete the agreement. • Renegotiate the agreement.

Three options for dealing with your agreement with yourself: 1 Lower your standards about your garage (you may have done that already). “So I have a crappy garage . .. who cares?” 2 Keep the agreement—clean the garage. 3 At least put “Clean garage” on a “Someday/Maybe” list.

Then, when you review that list weekly and you see that item, you can tell yourself, “Not this week.” The next time you walk by your garage, you won’t hear a thing internally, other than “Ha! Not this week.”

If you’re holding something only internally, it will be a broken agreement if you’re not moving on it in the moment.

The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it’s that it’s not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.

When someone nods “yes, I will” in a conversation but doesn’t write anything down, my “uh-oh” bell rings. This is unacceptable behavior in my world.

The Power of the Next-Action Decision

For any outcome that we have an internal commitment to complete, we must make the decision about the next physical action required. There’s a great difference, however, between making that decision when things show up and doing it when they blow up.

How could something so simple be so powerful—“What’s the next action?” To help answer that question, I invite you to revisit for a moment your mind-sweep list (see page 113).

What’s ironic is that it would likely require only about ten seconds of thinking to figure out what the next action would be for almost everything on your list. But it’s ten seconds of thinking that most people haven’t done about most things on their list.

Defining what real doing looks like, on the most basic level, and organizing placeholder reminders that we can trust, are master keys to productivity enhancement.

Why Bright People Procrastinate the Most

Who would procrastinate the most? Of course, it would be the most creative, sensitive, and intelligent people! Because their sensitivity gives them the capability of producing in their minds lurid nightmare scenarios about what might be involved in doing the project, and all the negative consequences that might occur if it weren’t done perfectly! They just freak out in an instant and quit!

Who doesn’t procrastinate? Often it’s the insensitive oafs who just take something and start plodding forward, unaware of all the things that could go wrong. Everyone else tends to get hung up about all kinds of things.

So what’s the solution? There’s always having a drink. Numb it out. Dumb it down. Notice what happens to many people when they get a little alcohol on the brain. It should drop their energy immediately, because it’s a depressant; often, though, the energy lifts, atleast initially. Why? The alcohol is depressing something—it’s shutting down the negative self-talk and uncomfortable visions that are going on in these folks’ minds.Of course my energy will increase if I stop depressing myself. But the numb-out solutions are temporary at best.The “stuff” doesn’t go away. And unfortunately, when we numb ourselves out, we can’t do it selectively - the source of inspiration and enthusiasm and personal energy also seems to get numbed.

Intelligent Dumbing Down

There is another solution: intelligently dumbing down your brain by figuring out the next action. You’ll invariably feel a relieving of pressure about anything you have a commitment to change or do, when you decide on the very next physical action required to move it forward. Nothing, essentially, will change in the world. But shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable, completeable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation. After creating the list at the end of mind-sweep, go through the list again now and decide on the single very next action to take on every one of them. Notice what happens to your energy. You are either attracted or repelled by the things on your lists; there isn’t any neutral territory. Often it’s simply the next-action decision that makes the difference between the two extremes.

I’ve discovered that one of the subtler ways many of them fall off the wagon is in letting their action lists grow back into lists of tasks or subprojects instead of discrete next actions. The more efficient way to move through life- deciding next actions on your projects as soon as they appear on your radar screen and then efficiently grouping them into categories of actions that you get done in certain uniform contexts, or avoiding thinking about what exactly needs to be done until it has to be done,then nickel-and-diming your activities as you try to catch up and put out the fires?

The number one complaint in compaies is about the last-minute crisis work consistently promoted by team leaders who failed to make appropriate decisions on the front end.

Those projects with distant goal lines are still to be done as soon as possible; “long-term” simply means, “more action steps until it’s done,” not “no need to decide next actions because the day of reckoning is so far away.”

The daily behaviors that define the things that are incomplete and the moves that are needed to complete them must change. Getting things going of your own accord, before you’re forced to by external pressure and internal stress, builds a firm foundation of self-worth that will spread into every aspect of your life. You are the captain of your own ship; the more you act from that perspective, the better things will go for you.

When you start to make things happen, you really begin to believe that you can make things happen. And that makes things happen.

The Power of Outcome Focusing

The Power Of directing our mental and imaginative processes to create change has been studied in thousands of contexts.

The people who are most attracted to implementing Getting Things Done are usually already on a self-development track and don’t assume that they’ll be doing the same thing a year from now that they’re doing now, anyway. But they love the fact that this method gets them there faster and more easily. For some, slowing down, getting out of the squirrel cage, and taking care of themselves may be the major change precipitated by this methodology. The bottom line is it makes you more conscious, more focused, and more capable of implementing the changes and results you want, whatever they are.

As whole-brain learning expert Steven Snyder, put it, “There are only two problems in life: (1) you know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it; and/or (2) you don’t know what you want.”

There are only two solutions: • Make it up. • Make it happen.

Everything you experience as incomplete must have a reference point for “complete.” Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions. When your operational behavior is to organize everything that comes your way at all levels, based upon those dynamics, a deep alignment occurs, and wondrous things emerge. You become highly productive. You make things up, and you make them happen.

People aren’t any smarter after they work with me than they were before—they just direct and utilize their intelligence more productively. “What does this mean to me?” “What do I want to have be true about it?” “What’s the next step required to make that happen?” These are the cornerstone questions we must answer, at some point, about everything. This thinking, and the tools that support it, will serve you in ways you may not yet imagine.

The Power of Natural Planning Being comfortable with challenging the purpose of anything you may be doing is healthy and mature. Being able to “make up” visions and images of success, before the methods are clear, is a phenomenal trait to strengthen. Being willing to have ideas, good or bad, and to express and capture all of them without judgments is critical for fully accessing creative intelligence. Honing multiple ideas and types of information into components, sequences, and priorities aimed toward a specific outcome is a necessary mental discipline. And deciding on and taking real next actions—actually moving on something in the physical world—are the essence of productivity.

The basic principle is determining outcomes and actions for everything we consider to be our work. Those two key focus points along with the addition of brainstorming makes for an elegant set of behaviors for staying relaxed and getting things done.

Getting Things Done is a road map to achieve the positive,relaxed focus that characterizes your most productive state. I invite you to use it, like a road map, as a reference tool to get back there whenever you need to.

GTD Habits :

keep everything out of your head;

decide actions and outcomes when things first emerge on your radar, instead of later;

regularly review

update the complete inventory of open loops of your life and work.

© Prabu Anand K 2020-2026