I was already fairly happy when I started this blog. After all, that was why I created it. But in writing about the matter, for the world to see, I felt that much more accountable for my happiness. I quickly became conscious of my habits that contribute to it negatively and positively, as well as potentially happiness-raising habits I wasn’t partaking in.
One of those was mindfulness, which I started experimenting with upon starting this blog. A few weeks into practicing daily, app-based guided meditations, I read a book seemingly unrelated to mindfulness. A book on productivity, and it’s right there in the title: Getting Things Done. It sounds formal, efficient, perhaps even cold. After reading it and following Allen’s suggestions, I can tell you: it does way more than it says on the tin. Yes, I get more done now, and it’s great. But I got something I never even realised I needed: A clear head.
Only with this newly cleared head did I realise just how unnecessarily filled my head was before. I now also notice much quicker whenever it’s not. Thoughts like “once home, send that email to my boss” or “don’t forget to hang up clothes before they dry up” were stuck on an endless loop until I did said thing – or forgot about it. It took a lot of energy to keep those reminders front of mind, which I also didn’t realise until I could let my mind relax. My ignorance of there being a better way was a big part of why I never got into mindfulness by then.
So how exactly does a productivity system help you become more mindful? It’s all about writing things down to empty your head (there’s a bit more to it, which we’ll get to shortly). David Allen, the author, argues that a big part of why many of us feel so stressed all the time is that our heads are full of unhelpful thoughts about things we need to do. While it’s vital to know what we need to do, that knowledge doesn’t belong in our heads. That’s because we’re lousy at remembering what to do, and it takes a significant amount of effort to try.
Instead, that knowledge belongs on paper. Or a phone, or computer. The tool is up to you, the point is just to build trust with an external system that does the remembering for you. Most of us have written some form of to-do list for just that reason: at least briefly, it helps clear our brains. But we don’t do it in a consistent, systematic manner, which is why, for most of us, our heads are never clear for long; thoughts about new things we need to do creep back in. That’s where GTD comes in.
By consistently relying on a trusted external system for reminders, there’s no need to hold on to the thought of buying more toilet paper after work, or picking up Molly from soccer. We can just be. GTD is nothing revolutionary – it builds on behaviours we already sometimes show, making it incredibly easy to learn and practice. It just adds a bit of structure and consistency to create an intuitive process.
Letting go of repetitive thoughts doesn’t just relieve stress. We can use that energy we won back to do the things our brains are good at: thinking, planning, and solving problems. As Allen himself puts it, “our brains are for having ideas, not holding them.” The key for GTD to work is trust. Trust that you know that your to-do list is always up to date. Trust that you’ll look at your list often enough to never miss anything important. How do we build that trust? By following the five stages of GTD, each of which we’ll explore. But first, let’s define some terms, just to make sure we’re on the same page.
What is work?
This may seem like an odd question, as we all recognise “work” when we do it. But we also do heaps of work outside of the workplace, even if we don’t always think of it as work. By explicitly defining “work”, we can see just how far-reaching the scope of GTD is.
For the purpose of Getting Things Done, work is any discrepancy between an ideal state and the current reality. It’s what you need to do to get the reality to that ideal state. Let’s illustrate with some examples.
Example 1: Work at work
Say the ideal state is that there is a new page on your company’s website promoting the latest product it just launched. In reality, there isn’t, so the work here involves all the steps needed to design the page, test it, and get it up and running.
Example 2: Work at home
Whenever your kitchen is dirtier than your personal cleanliness threshold, there’s new work to be done: clean the damn kitchen!
It’s that simple. Some types of work require only a single action, others require more. They’re all work. In GTD terminology, a project is any piece of work that requires two or more action steps to complete.
With work and projects defined, we’re ready to look at the first and perhaps most important step in the GTD process: Collecting.
- Collect things that command our attention
Many things command our attention, not just reminders of immediate priorities at work. Sometimes you’ll remember those acting classes you aspired to take, or that bar you wanted to check out, or that you haven’t spoken to Tina in ages and should hang out again.
In GTD, we collect ALL of this stuff. Whether it’s something you need to do today, or something you thought could be a fun thing to maybe try in thirty years, we write it. All. Down. Is that a bit of an effort? You bet. Will that result in a ridiculously big to-do list? Absolutely. But once you purge your mind of all the things bouncing around uselessly in there, you’ll be free to think. Free to do. Free to come up with new ideas and solve problems. And it feels great – it’s liberating. We’ll also look at ways to organise that list so even if it’s massive, it’s neat.
Where do we collect it?
This is one of the things that GTD doesn’t prescribe – it’s whatever works best for you. The only important thing is that everything is in the one place, and that you trust it – which means keeping it up to date, which we’ll cover in the following sections. If you’re old school and are really good at keeping paper-based lists up to date, boom, that’s an option. I know a lot of people into GTD that use Outlook’s tasks feature.
Personally, after playing around with a few apps, I’m very happy with Microsoft To Do, because it’s free, it can organise actions into different themed groups, it can send reminders, it has a nice interface, and most importantly, it syncs between my phone and computer, so I can check it from anywhere.
Compare this to my old system, in which I’d always add a to-do list to whatever Word document or iOS notes I had open at the time. Soon, they’d be scattered all over the place, so I never consistently trusted my system. I often forgot about stuff – making me less stressed until I realised too late that it was a dropped ball, and disappointing whomever would have benefited from that work.
Whatever you use, your collection of “stuff” is what GTD calls your in-basket. Think of it like an inbox, but for everything, not just emails.
How do we collect everything?
First, we have to do a massive brain purge, ideally all in one sitting. A lot of stuff will naturally come out of your head, but what do we do when we can’t think of more stuff? Thankfully, there are guided collections like this one. You see a list of trigger words – different categories of life for which you might have personal goals or to-dos, like relationships, finance, career, and so on. If you prefer listening, they come in podcast form too, in which an instructor guides you through the purge.
You might not get EVERYTHING everything down, but you’ll have the majority. And from then, it’s just about making a habit of collecting stuff that either appears randomly in your head, or that comes in on the day (say you receive an email with a new task), and IMMEDIATELY writing it into whatever system you use. New work will always keep popping up, but by habitually writing it down, we no longer need a fat purge to get it all out of our heads.
2. Process the “stuff” we collected
So now we’ve collected everything we can possibly collect, and are left with a whole steaming pile of “stuff”. Let’s say that one small section of our in-basket looks like this (which a lot of to-dos, including my old ones, look like):
To-do
Mum
Dry cleaners
Groceries
Lunch with Tom
Can you see anything that might be wrong with it? At a high level, it hasn’t been processed yet. “Dry cleaners” is just a place, not an action. Do we need to pick something up, or give them something? “Lunch with Tom” might require several actions, like calling Tom to agree on a date, calling a restaurant to book it, and, if you’re like me, choosing a week ahead of time what you’re gonna eat there.
So what does it mean to process your stuff? We answer a short and simple list of questions about each item, seen in this diagram below. The overarching question is “What is it?”, which you answer through the following set of questions. First, is it actionable?
If it is, the big question is “What’s the next action?”. This is the crux of GTD. Once you’ve defined your action, the final question is whether you can do it in under two minutes. If yes, do it now. If not, you can decide whether it’s more appropriate to just defer to another time, or delegate it to someone else.
3. Organise our “stuff”
The next step is to organise your stuff, based on your processing. To me, these two steps go hand in hand, so it’s more like process an item from the in-basket, organise it based on that processing, move on to the next item. To see what we do with items we’ve processed, we now focus on the outer, coloured, rounded shapes in the diagram below to the right.
If the item is not actionable, you have three options, the first being to trash it – chuck it out. Be realistic and be harsh – if you know you’ll never need it, don’t let it take up your physical or mental space, whether it’s a paper, an email, or something else. This could be spam or promotional emails for stuff you don’t care about, or even stuff that was once relevant but is now out of date.
If you might want to do it some day, but know you don’t have the capacity at the moment, put it in a someday/maybe list. This could be things like acting classes or skydiving or things that scare you but are on your bucket list. You’ll review this list every now and then so one day, if you’re ready, you can move them into your immediate to-do list.
Finally, if it’s simply information, and it could be useful, perhaps for a project you’re working on, or it’ll help you figure out how to do something, keep it in a reference folder, whether that’s physical or virtual. You can’t do anything with the material, but it’ll help you with other actions in your in-basket. An example for me is information I find on things that are tax deductible – I can’t do anything with it now, but I keep it so I have it handy when tax return time comes around. The GTD book has a lot more in the way of detailed guides of how to set up and use such non-action lists, but I want to focus on the actionable stuff for this post – the fun stuff.
Any items that need more than a single action to be completed, we move into a dedicated projects folder. Even for projects, it’s incredibly important to have defined what the very next action would be to move it forward – I’ll explain why when we get to the review section. An example of a project could be “Get a birthday present for mum.” Within that, the first action may be to check giftsformother.com for inspiration, or, if your family is as German as mine, just call her and ask her what she wants.
For individual action steps, we covered doing, delegating, and deferring. But to get organised, there’s one more step. If you delegated it, add it to a “Waiting for” list. By reviewing it regularly enough, you have an overview of all the things that are meant to be getting done by others, and so you won’t forget even if someone else has. Without knowing these, you can’t remind people or check in on their progress, so it’s vital to have such a list, even if you’re not the one doing the action.
If you defer it, and it has to be done at a specific date or time, add it to your calendar so you’ll be reminded at the best moment. If the exact time doesn’t matter, add it to your list of next actions.
If you decide to look further into organising, you’ll find that GTD has some recommendations regarding what sorts of lists of actions you have, like “at computer” or “calls”. They might help you, but personally I find some of them not too relevant for me. Calling is not a big part of my job or personal life, and I’m rarely not at the PC or on my phone, so having those as separate categories makes little sense for me.
4. Review our “stuff” regularly
Just like you only need to do one big collection mind-sweep before habitually collecting things as they appear, you hopefully only need to do one mass processing and organising session before it becomes a habit for incoming stuff.
But sometimes, life gets in the way, and you quickly type something you remembered while you’re, say, walking, and you don’t have time to process and organise it right away – you just want to make sure you have it at all. Given enough time, lists might start to look a bit disorganised again, and that’s ok. That’s natural. That’s why we need to regularly review them. I mentioned before that defining the immediate action for any project is crucial, and the reason for that ties into why the regular review is so important.
There’s a proverb that puts it perfectly:
“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”
Let’s unpack this. Say you’re feeling energetic, motivated, and are fully in “Doing” mode. You’re ready to knock things off that in-basket and get things done. But you look at your to-do list, and half the entries are either single words like “mum” or projects with multiple steps yet to be figured out, like “tax return 2021”. You’re now limited to either those entries that are properly defined, or you have to use up some of that energy and motivation to think about what needs to be done, before being able to do it.
However, if you review your list weekly, define next actions, and verbalise them all, then when you’re next in action mode, you can look at the list and immediately decide what to work on, and do it.
To help you review your work, GTD has 6 so-called horizons of focus, so you look at your work from every possible perspective. You can find more detail here, but at a basic level, it ranges from thinking about your work in terms of immediate to-dos, to areas you’re responsible for in your role, all the way up to whether work contributes to your purpose in life.
Horizons of focus
- Runway/ground: Next actions
- 10,000 foot level: Projects
- 20,000 foot: Areas of focus & responsibility
- 30,000 foot: One to two-year goals & objectives
- 40,000 foot: Three to five-year vision
- 50,000+ foot: Life (purpose/principles)
5. Do
As long as steps 1-4 have been completed to a good standard, this part becomes incredibly easy.
You might be wondering: with such a long list of actions we’ve defined, how do we choose what to work on? GTD does have two models to help out with this: One to evaluate what to focus on for a day, and another to decide what to do in any given moment.
They just make explicit the ways you might go about such decisions subconsciously anyway, but it can be helpful to spell them out like that.
The five stages at a glance
- Collect things that command our attention
- Process the “stuff” we’ve collected
- Organise our stuff
- Review weekly
- Do
That’s all there is to it! It might sound like a lot at first, but let’s review: First, we collect things that command our attention – ALL the things, until our heads are empty. This includes existing work we’re aware of, and new stuff as it comes in every day. We then process the stuff we collected, defining next actions for everything and then organising the actions into a system that works for you. We review our system weekly to keep it up-to-date and build trust with it. By doing so, we set ourselves up for the final step, which is doing.
My GTD system
What might such a system look like in action? Again, GTD doesn’t prescribe the tools, but I’ve been very happy with MS To Do. Here’s just a small glimpse into my system, but I hope it gives you enough information to give you a good place to start.
Let’s start by looking at the left hand side. You can see I have a list for shopping, and then I have a group of lists called “At work”, and at the bottom, further groups called “Self Improvement”, “Social + romance”, and “Career”. Below that are lists of tasks I couldn’t mentally fit into my existing groups. There are way more hiding below after scrolling.
Within each of those groups are all the projects that relate to that topic. So for example, within “At work”, I have projects from my team, as well as bonus things I volunteer for, like a Charity Masterclass on this same topic, and a networking list with people I want to meet for various reasons.
If we look at the middle, blue-ish/lavender part of the screen, we have a list of tasks within a project. So for this project, there’s not much I need to do right now. I also don’t have a dedicated “WAITING FOR” list, but rather put “WAITING” as a tag in front of tasks, because I like to keep them in their relevant category. If I do want to see all the things I’m waiting for, I can just search “WAITING”, and have a sort of temporary “WAITING FOR” list.
Finally, on the right, you can see individual steps for each task. I have to admit I’m a bit inconsistent here – sometimes, the task already is the next action, and sometimes, the steps are the actions. Other times, the steps are ideas, so this is something I need to work on. You can also set due dates, reminders, and notes. I can probably also do better at some of my naming conventions, but this is a massive improvement for me compared to what I had before.
I used to have my to-dos scattered in several documents, while now, even if the list is big, I have it all in one place. If I have free time, I just browse through it, update what I notice is out of date, and then do quick actions. I had a phase where I tried several different to do apps, but never stuck with one because I was looking for the perfect one. After reading this book, however, I just stuck with whatever was free and met my minimum requirements, because the system and how you use the tool is just as important as which tool. And the system is ultimately about doing, so before getting too caught up in perfecting the system, just try something out – you can always adjust it later.
Now, as soon as I hear myself say the words “will do” or “alright, I’ll…” to someone, I immediately write down the task.
For reference files, I use OneNote and Outlook folders and file folders.
Coming back to mindfulness
So can you just implement GTD in your life and become mindful while skipping all the meditating? Not exactly. I do think GTD is complementary to meditation, and has helped me immensely in preventing thoughts like “Don’t forget to text John happy birthday”. But are to dos the only thoughts we have? Of course not.
Every minute, we’re thinking of upcoming events we’re looking forward to and reminded of embarrassing or funny past moments. Rarely are we fully in the present. To me, GTD helped me save a lot of energy, as thoughts of the present and future at least automatically distract me, unlike the thoughts of reminders which I consciously need to hold on to. But effortless as these other thoughts may be, they still distract from the moment, which is why I’m glad I read this book at the same time as beginning guided meditations.
With the book, I could save mental energy and become more proactive and creative (not even touching on the other benefits of productivity). But with guided meditations, I could let go of other distracting thoughts and focus on the moment. At least sometimes. I’m a long way from being good at it, but a few months in, and I can see the reasons for getting into it.
Where you can learn more about GTD
I hope you got enough out of this post to make some positive changes in your life! As I said though, there’s a whole lot more information out there, and one single post won’t help you reach max productivity or the least stress – it requires ongoing tweaking and learning. So here are some of the resources that helped me so far, in addition to ones I linked to throughout the poast
The most obvious is the book this post is based on: Getting Things Done by David Allen. It helps to have a copy just to keep referring back to it and read it multiple times to discover little nuggets you missed. There’s also a 2015 revised edition – I haven’t read it just yet, but the general principles from the original have helped me heaps, and haven’t changed much, from what I’ve heard.
There’s also an official GTD podcast (just called Getting Things Done or GTD). A lot of the episodes are snippets from lectures David Allen gives, or conversations between him and other productivity experts – a lot of it is what you’ll find in the book anyway, but it helps me retain some of the info and stay motivated to keep it up. And if you haven’t read the book, it’ll be even more useful. They also have super useful sessions like a Guided Collection Mind-Sweep or a Guided Review, where you press play, and do your collection of loose ends or weekly review with the narrator’s help. I listen to mine in Overcast, but it should be available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Finally, for many people, the best way of learning is by discussing with others. There’s an official GTD forum, and I’m sure there’s heaps of unofficial ones too. I don’t know whether you need a paid account to post things, but even just reading other people’s entries can be helpful.
There are other productivity blogs and podcasts out there, like Asian Efficiency, which are GTD-inspired and add their own touch. Noting I’ve barely started reading them so I can’t judge them just yet. And finally, if half of GTD is about clearing your head, you might be interested in mindfulness. If so, I’ve found Sam Harris’ Waking Up app especially helpful, because in addition to guided meditation, it includes theory sessions explaining the science behind why meditation works and what you can get out of it. Other apps went straight into the meditations, but I wasn’t sure why I was even doing it.
I’m always keen to learn more, so I’d love to hear your suggestions and what helps you get more done or stay in the moment.