Getting Things Done - GTD
How to Get Started with GTD: Set up a System That Works and Make It a Habit
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
3. Organize, Reflect, and Engage: The Three Steps That Complete the GTD Workflow
4. How to Get Started with GTD: Set up a System That Works and Make It a Habit
In the previous articles, we’ve gone over the five steps of the GTD workflow: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. Understanding them is relatively simple. The challenge is incorporating them into your daily routine and not giving up on them after a few weeks, when the initial enthusiasm fades and old habits creep back in. In this fourth installment, we’ll focus on exactly that: how to put GTD into practice.
First the habits, then the system
The most common mistake when starting out with GTD is spending too much time trying to design the perfect system: comparing apps, defining dozens of contexts, building a flawless tag taxonomy… and never actually putting the methodology properly into practice.
That’s why our advice for getting started is to focus on habits and settle for a minimally functional system. A few lists that you check every day are worth much more than a sophisticated structure that you’ll abandon within a month. The system will become progressively more refined as you use it, and the weekly review is the natural time to do this: you’ll see which lists you never check, which contexts are unnecessary, and which ones you’re missing.
Customize your system
Even if it’s minimal, your system needs to show your real life—even if it’s not a complete picture. Start with projects, meaning all the tasks that require more than one action to complete. One or two lists are enough: a single list if you prefer to see all your commitments together; or two, one personal and one professional, if your two spheres are clearly separate.
Next come the contexts, which answer a very specific question: What do I need in order to perform this action? Sometimes it’s a tool, sometimes a place, and sometimes a person. It’s often helpful to think of them in groups. Communications give rise to contexts such as #calls, #phone, or #whatsapp. Tools lead to contexts such as #computer, which you can break down into personal and work-related if you use different devices. Workplaces generate contexts such as #office or #company, and fixed locations in your personal life generate others such as #home or #home2 if you have a second residence. Finally, there are temporary locations: #errands for everything you do outside, or contexts for places you visit fairly often, such as #town or #Madrid. The idea is that, when you’re in one of those situations, you’ll see only what you can do there. If a context is always empty or you never check it, delete it without hesitation.
There’s one type of context that deserves special mention: agendas. It involves creating a context with the name of each person you interact with frequently and share certain activities with, such as your manager, your partner, or a close colleague. Whenever something comes up that you need to discuss with that person, instead of sending them a message or walking over to their desk right then and there, you write it down in their agenda. When you talk, you go over the list and address everything at once. In practice, it’s an anti-interruption tool: you stop interrupting others, and over time, your example encourages others to do the same with you.
Tags, which resemble contexts in appearance, serve a different function. They don’t tell you where or how to take action; instead, they’re used to organize reference material and items in the “Someday/Maybe” list. You can have an #ideas tag to save thoughts you don’t want to forget, topic-based tags like #programming or #design, and collections like #movies you want to watch, #places you want to visit, or #beers you want to try. When properly labeled, the “Someday/Maybe” list stops being a jumble and becomes a catalog you’ll want to browse from time to time.
There’s one practical question left: how to link each action to its project. The easiest way is through the wording itself. An action like “Call the management company to ask about the tax return” makes it clear which project it belongs to without needing anything else. You can also use tags for this, but you run the risk of them getting mixed up with contexts and other tags until you no longer know what each one means. If you choose to use an app to implement GTD, it will usually allow you to link each action directly to its project.
Mind sweep
With the lists prepared, it’s time to fill them out. A mind sweep is a systematic and exhaustive recording of everything that demands your attention: commitments, unfinished tasks, ideas, concerns, and things you should have done but haven’t. The problem is that none of this comes to mind on its own, because memory works by association and needs stimuli. That’s why the sweep relies on a list of potential unfinished items, a reference list with categories that trigger memories. In the professional sphere, this includes things like projects you’ve started but not finished, commitments to your manager or coworkers, pending calls and emails, meetings to prepare for, or administrative tasks. On the personal front, it covers the house and home repairs, family, health, finances, travel, hobbies, or things you need to buy.
The process has three steps. First, you capture ideas by going through the list at a leisurely pace and jotting down everything that comes to mind, without evaluating anything just yet. Next, you clarify and organize what you’ve captured, just as we saw in the previous articles. And finally, you cross off the categories you’ve already reviewed from the “triggers” list. This last step is what allows you to tackle the mind sweep in several stages: the first time you do it usually takes a while, so it’s okay to spread it out over several sessions as long as you know where you left off.
We’ve already seen in other articles that pending tasks lead to intrusive thoughts that interfere with other tasks. By combining the mind sweep with the clarification phase, you don’t complete everything on your to-do list, but each item ends up with a defined next step and an proper reminder, and your mind will stop reminding you of it every few moments. It’s normal to feel a bit overwhelmed when you see the volume of what you’ve captured, but that volume was already there; the difference is that now you can see it.
The initial goals
Don’t try to master it all from day one. The initial goal boils down to four habits:
- capture everything that catches your attention as soon as it appears;
- clarify and organize everything you’ve captured on a daily basis;
- choose your next action by filtering based on the criteria we discussed in the previous article;
- and do your weekly review.
With these four habits in place, you already have a minimally functional system. Everything else can wait.
You’ll probably also have to re-educate the people around you. The people in your life are used to interrupting you when they need to and to expecting an immediate response. Setting aside blocks of uninterrupted time, grouping communications together, or starting to use agendas takes time, but people adapt quickly once they realize that, even if you don’t answer right away, you’ll always get back to them.
Tips for improving your personal effectiveness
The first key is to recognize that sustainable change is built on habits, and that habits are adopted gradually. A study by Phillippa Lally and her team, published in 2010 in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found that it took participants an average of 66 days to make a new behavior automatic, with huge variations between individuals and between habits: ranging from 18 to 254 days. The same study noted that skipping a single day did not derail the process. The practical takeaway is twofold: patience, and not trying to adopt all habits at once.
The second key is to make the work clear. Much of the stress doesn’t come from the amount of work, but from not knowing exactly what it implies. That’s why GTD emphasizes turning the unknown into something known, breaking down each outcome into a visible next action, and making the wording of each task as specific as possible. “Prepare a budget” forces you to rethink it every time you read it; “Ask Lewis for the estimated hours for the client’s budget” doesn’t. That specificity helps you when it’s time to take action, because you don’t have to decide anything, and also during your weekly review, because you can see at a glance where each item stands.
The third key has to do with attention. We can work with reactive attention, responding to whatever comes our way, which is inefficient and shouldn’t be the rule. We can work with proactive attention, which we use to analyze and make decisions: it doesn’t cause stress, but it does require effort, and it’s the kind of attention suited for moments like clarifying tasks or conducting the weekly review. And we can work with receptive attention, in which, since everything has already been decided, you simply flow from one action to the next without stressing. Much of the beauty of GTD lies in the fact that it helps you invest your proactive effort at the right moments so you can spend the rest of your time in receptive mode.
Related to this is the principle of being present in what you’re doing. Work that requires concentration needs continuous, uninterrupted blocks of time. In 2009, researcher Sophie Leroy described what she called “attention residue”: when we switch tasks, part of our attention remains tied to the previous one, and our performance on the new task suffers as a result. Constantly jumping from one thing to another comes at a cost, even if we don’t realize it.
It’s also a good idea to make the most of your energy. Knowing yourself means knowing when you’re at your most productive during the day and setting aside those times for demanding tasks, while saving routine tasks for when your energy levels decline.
And finally, start and finish: completing what you start brings a sense of satisfaction that your brain appreciates, while letting things remain half-finished creates the feeling that you’re never making progress, even if you’re working nonstop.
The surfboard effect
You’re going to fall. There will be chaotic weeks when your inbox overflows, you don’t get anything sorted out, and you skip your weekly review. It’s inevitable, and it’s good to know this from the start so you don’t see it as a failure. It’s just like learning to surf: falling is part of the process, and in fact, it’s a sign that you’re using the method, because you can only fall off a board you’ve actually gotten on. The important thing is to realize it and get back on. A quick mind sweep, clarifying everything that’s piled up, and a weekly review, is enough to get back on track in a matter of hours, without having to start from scratch.
David Allen uses an image drawn from martial arts to describe the state that GTD aims for: the mind like water. If you throw a stone into a pond, the water responds exactly in proportion to the force applied and then returns to calm. It neither overreacts nor underreacts. That is what a system you trust enables: responding to each thing with the attention it deserves (no more and no less) rather than reacting to the loudest stimulus of the moment.
The path towards GTD mastery
None of these practices happen on their own. You have to work on them every day and reinforce them until they become habits. Once you achieve that, you’ll be able to maintain focus, or quickly regain it when you lose it; eliminate distractions and focus on what really matters. In short, you’ll keep your world in balance.
That’s why, beyond simply getting more done, effectiveness has a lot to do with well-being: with the peace of mind that comes from knowing everything is under control and that what you’re doing at any given moment is what makes sense to do. Of all the habits we’ve discussed, there’s one that underpins the others and makes the difference between those who practice GTD for years and those who give it up after just a few months: the weekly review. We’ll cover this in the next and final article in the series.
No comments