One of the reasons GTD has achieved great recognition as a personal productivity system is that it doesn’t reduce our daily activity to a simple set of tasks to be marked as done. That’s oversimplified. Although being productive is about getting more done with as little effort as possible, we aren’t machines. We’re human beings, and our actions must respond to something deeper.
Getting Things Done is a personal productivity method that is easy to learn as everything it teaches is common sense, yet it can be difficult to put into practice, at least at first. There are a number of habits you need to implement, and creating habits you don’t have can be hard.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, as well as a Nazi concentration camp survivor, wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he analysed man’s capacity to overcome his difficulties from a psychiatric point of view. He explains that all human beings, unlike animals, have self-awareness and the ability to act on the basis of that awareness. This means that we’re capable of responding to a stimulus in a completely different way to what our instincts suggest and even to what we have been taught.
Capturing is certainly the easiest productive habit to explain within the GTD methodology and also the easiest to understand:
The Clarify step of GTD essentially consists in transforming the things you have collected in your inboxes, giving them the real meaning they have in your world. By doing so, you eliminate the uncertainty and stress that can result from their lack of definition.
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