Getting Things Done - GTD
Capture and Clarify: The First Two Steps of the GTD Workflow
AUTHOR: María Sáez
Brief introduction to the GTD methodology:
1. The Perfect Storm: Why Modern Work Overwhelms and How to Deal with It
2. Capture and Clarify: The First Two Steps of the GTD Workflow
In the previous article, we looked at what GTD is and why so many people adopt it as their go-to system for staying organized. Now it’s time to dive into the workflow itself, starting with its first two steps: capturing and clarifying. These are the foundations on which everything else rests, and they’re also the hardest to turn into a habit.
Capture
David Allen sums it up with a phrase worth keeping in mind:
The mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
When we use our minds as a storage place for pending tasks (that meeting we need to schedule, the call we mustn’t forget, the idea that came to us in the shower), our minds never stop going over them, even if we can’t do anything about them at that moment. Every unresolved commitment consumes background attention, even when we think we’re focused on something else. Capturing is the first step towards closing that loop.
The sources from which these “stuff” arise (as GTD calls them, precisely because at the moment we capture them we don’t yet know what they are or what we’re going to do with them) are varied: your own mind, loose papers, email, voicemail, a casual conversation in the hallway. Some things get captured almost automatically, like emails or notifications; others require us to pause for a second and write them down somewhere before they get lost.
The real goal of this step isn’t so much to prevent forgetfulness, though that’s part of it, as much as to retrain how we manage our attention. Every time we capture something instead of trying to hold onto it mentally, we teach our mind that it can safely let go and continue paying attention to what it was doing, because there’s an external, reliable place where it will be stored. We teach it to be present, to stay focused.
For this to work, you have to get used to capturing stuff without hesitation: anything, no matter how small or vague it may seem, has a place. You shouldn’t filter or make any decisions at the moment of capture; that evaluation comes later, during the clarifying step. Filtering at the moment of capture is what usually breaks the habit. You have to capture everything.
Having the right tool for capturing stuff in every situation is essential. The easier it is to capture information, the more automatic the behavior becomes. It doesn’t matter if it’s a notebook, an app, or a voice memo; what matters is that it’s always at hand when the need arises and allows you to capture with minimal friction.
That said, capturing alone has limited value. If the items we capture pile up without us doing anything with them, we’ve ended up with a backlog of unresolved tasks, not a clear and uncluttered mind. The value of capturing depends entirely on the second step that follows: clarifying.
Clarify
In practice, clarifying and organizing go hand in hand, and it’s best to do them all at once: empty your inboxes completely, without leaving anything half-done. For those who haven’t practiced GTD before, this step involves a mental process that doesn’t come naturally at first, so it’s a good idea to force yourself to go through the questions consciously until they become second nature.
- The first question is simply what it is. Before deciding anything, we need to understand what that issue is all about, what it really means to us.
- The second question is whether it’s actionable: Do we want to do something about it, and, furthermore, is there anything we can do? “Painting the wall” isn’t actionable if we don’t have paint at home; there’s a preliminary step that needs to be taken first.
- If the answer is that it’s not actionable, there are three options: simply trash it, file it away for future reference if it’s information that might be useful down the road (a contract, a warranty, meeting notes), or incubate it, that is, consciously set it aside because we’ve decided not to make a decision just yet.
- If the matter is indeed actionable, the key question is what the next action is. In GTD, the next action is the next concrete, visible step that moves the matter forward; something that is started and finished in one go, without depending on any intermediate steps. “Prepare for the meeting with the client” isn’t a next action; “send an email to Ana asking for the meeting agenda” is. Defining the action with that level of specificity is precisely what most people fail to do, and it’s the reason why so many tasks get stuck without anyone really knowing why.
Once you’ve identified the next action, there are three ways to handle it: do it right away if it can be completed in less than two minutes (the well-known two-minute rule, designed for tasks that can be resolved immediately); delegate it if you’re not the right person to carry it out; or postpone it, setting a reminder to return to it at the appropriate time.
When we’re going to delegate a task, we often need to prepare something beforehand. In that case, the next actual action is that preliminary preparation, and only then comes the step of delegating.
5. Finally, if the matter requires more than one step to complete, clarify it by asking a broader question: What is the end result we are seeking? If step 4 is sufficient to resolve the matter, the process ends there; if not, we are dealing with a project (any outcome that requires more than one step and can be achieved in less than a year), and it should be defined as such.
Defining the action first and then the project seems counterintuitive. That’s because we tend to do it the other way around—planning the entire project before taking the first step—and that’s precisely what leads to overplanning. Clarifying involves thinking and deciding, not designing a complete plan before taking action.
When the issue to be clarified is an email (a common scenario) it almost never involves just a single issue. It’s common for a single message to contain several different stuff within the same email, and each one needs to go through its own clarification process.
Capturing without clarifying simply shifts the noise from your head to a list; clarifying is what truly clears your mind, because each item is transformed into a decision you’ve made. With these two steps complete, the system is ready for the next one: organizing each item in its proper place, which is what we’ll discuss in the next article in this series.
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