Background
The Getting Things Done (GTD) system was developed and popularized by productivity guru David Allen. It was introduced to the world through his book so appropriately titled Getting Things Done. Being highly efficient and therefore highly productive is something that we are a bit obsessed over and GTD is our favorite system so far for staying on top of all of our tasks and completing them in a timely manner. Although we do take our own creative spin on the system and don’t follow the method exactly as prescribed it still maintains the core elements.
At first glance GTD might seem like a lot of required energy to spend on planning how to spend required energy, in short a little overkill by some people’s standards. In fact it doesn’t take much effort to incorporate the system into your daily workflow and even then it’s time that most of you would rather spend planning instead of stressing or forgetting important tasks. At the end of the day, you can expect to get two things out of GTD: reduced stress, and increased productivity.
Overview
GTD is a system for capturing, organizing, and then acting on tasks that you need or want to get done, much like a to-do list but a little bit more structured and methodical. It might seem like overkill to someone who has never used a to-do list or someone that used a to-do list and still found gaps in their overall productivity either by forgetting about things or just putting them off indefinitely but GTD is highly effective in ways that other systems are simply not suited for. It is designed to eliminate from the task organization process the things that our brains are simply not good at doing, namely remembering things. The quote made famous by David Allen is ‘Our brain is made for having ideas, not storing them’.
The system is easily set up with a couple simple components, an inbox designed for quick capture of thoughts, and folders or buckets or other organizational systems designed to sort the tasks before acting upon them. The rest of the system is really built on the processes and methods by which we interact with the system. One thing of note as we move forward is that these components can manifest themselves digitally or they can be more analog if that is what you prefer. What we mean by that is that we use a mobile app to adopt this system into our lives but you might be more comfortable with something like a pen and notepad. You can get pretty creative with the tools that you use and although we would argue that certain mobile apps are just going to be more efficient than a pen and paper, all of that means nothing if you don’t use it so choose a platform that you are motivated to use.
The Inbox
The first and in our opinion, the absolutely most important component of this system is the inbox. When your inbox is tight then the rest of your system can be loose, but if your inbox is loose then this system will never work. The inbox is the foundation that this entire system rests upon and without it the rest of it would cease to exist.
The goal of your inbox is to become the quickest method of capture between the thoughts that come into your mind and those thoughts manifesting themselves into written text. As soon as you have an idea pop into your head you should have an efficient, frictionless method of capture where you have complete confidence in the fact that it will be there for you later. If you have the time on hand you can quickly categorize the task and give it a due date and priority, but if you don’t have the time you can just jot it down and worry about processing the task later in your day.
We use an app called Todoist that has this feature baked in and comes with very handy widgets for quick inbox capture that you can launch from your home screen or lock screen. This works really well because we can either type or speak the tasks into our inbox which is just shy of a mind reading device in terms of how quick it can capture ideas. Alternatively you could carry around a small notepad and pen if that is more up your alley, just know that in order for it to work effectively you will need to be able to reach that note pad at all times and very quickly, otherwise you start to break down the systems that make your inbox effective.
Depending on how busy you might be or the turn over rate of your deliverables you might want to organize your inbox couple of times a day. We recommend at least starting with one good review first thing in the morning and you can throttle the frequency from there. During your review you will basically synthesize your inbox and then move the tasks into their appropriate categories and assigned priority levels, due dates, dependancies, etc.
Having your inbox locked in will be important because the more you use it the more confident you become in the system. If you know that every time you have and idea you are going to write it down and then at some point eventually complete that task, the more you will be inclined to keep using the system and the more you use it the stronger the reinforcement and the cycle continues. This is why the inbox is absolutely critical and why we recommend really dialing this part of the system in.
The Buckets
The buckets and or folders that you decide to use are entirely up to you and dependent on your workflow. Generally we recommend categorizing tasks either by level of urgency, or when you want to have the tasks completed which many a times go hand in hand. You could for example, have buckets for urgent, optional, and non-urgent tasks you could also have a bucket for tasks you want to complete by the end of the day, end of the week, and end of the month. If for some reason you have some of other metric for evaluating the order at which you want to complete tasks then you can certainly use that as well.
For our use case, the preferred time frame for completion works really well because there is a natural progression of tasks through the buckets as time moves on. In example, a task might start in the ’end of week’ bucket and as the week progresses naturally we would assume that it would get promoted to the ’end of day’ bucket and so on. This also gives us a little bit of a pseudo deadline which works really for us in enabling our productivity.
We recommend getting specific with the buckets you decide to embrace and don’t be afraid to add or remove buckets as you start becoming more familiar with this process. We have a bucket for tasks that are ‘on hold’ or have a long term completion dates so they don’t clutter up the rest of the buckets. This is all important because if you are not strict with your tasks and what buckets you assign them to then your workflow can become cluttered with tasks that linger or don’t get completed for extended periods. You’ll look at those tasks frequently and feel like they are never getting completed which can lead to more stress than it’s worth.
The review process
As we mentioned before, the intervals at which you perform your reviews is going to be different depending on your workload and scope but once in the morning and once in the evening works well for us. Although the process will be a little bit different depending on the time of day for us the core is still the same.
The first and most important step that you want to take is to review your inbox. You want to categorize tasks, assign dead lines, and determine the level of urgency at a minimum. You also want to determine if this tasks is even worth your time to perform OR if it is really worth your time to continue to process the tasks and have it go through your entire workflow instead of completing it on the spot. David Allen has a handy ‘5 minute rule’, which basically states that if the task will take less than 5 minutes to complete then you should just complete it on the spot and not worry about sorting it any further into the system.
The next step is to then review each individual bucket and/or task in each bucket to ensure that everything still holds up. If you had a tasks that was in the ‘urgent’ bucket and it’s all of sudden not that important for you to complete then move it to the appropriate bucket or delete the tasks all together. You really want to preserve the integrity of your ‘urgent’ or ’end of day’ buckets and make sure that only the tasks that really deserve to live there are allowed to stay. The reason being that those two buckets and others alike are going to be your breadwinners and your main source of dopamine rewards ideally, further enabling you to use this system. At the end of the day every single tasks in your ’end of day’ bucket should be complete, this should be non-negotiable because you are only going to get that complete sense of accomplishment when you complete those lists on a regular basis.
The Wrap-Up
As mentioned this our interpretation of the GTD system and not exactly what was prescribed by David Allen. It’s what works for us and you should really find the best system that works for you, maybe that is the pure form of GTD, or our spin, or somewhere in between. Try things out, see what works and keep things that do and change the ones that don’t. The fact that you are even reading an article like this speaks to your will to improve… trust the process.