“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.” ~ Shunryu Suzuki

Imagine if you could keep all your personal management under control at all times and at all levels. Imagine if you could dedicate all your attention, with no distractions, to whatever you decide to do. Imagine if you could get meaningful things done in a relaxed way and with minimal effort.

Horizontal focus is the key to a relaxed control over your daily activities. It is about clearly defining the outcomes you want—your projects—and the next actions required to achieve them, and creating reminders on a trusted system that you review regularly.

Normally we go through a five-stages workflow method to deal with our work. We (1) collect things that catch our attention, we (2) process what they mean and we (3) organize the results, which we (4) review frequently to choose which thing to (5) do next.

You usually feel bad when you do not get things done that you had committed to do, but this feeling of anxiety and guilty is not because of the many things you have to do. Frustration comes up when you break an agreement that you have made with yourself.

GTD is a tool whose goal is to eliminate the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to get it all done. It is based on the principle that we must negotiate our internal commitments effectively.

Sometimes we need some kind of rigor to keep complex projects under control, find a solution or determine the right steps to take in order to complete them successfully.

In GTD it is not necessary to explicitly define the priority of every action, because priorities sit in a hierarchy of different levels of perspective. This is what David Allen calls the Six-Level Model for reviewing your own work: