Tag: “Capture”

If you follow the GTD philosophy in your personal organization you already know that one of its most important principles is to capture quickly and without thinking every thing what comes to your mind, so that you can continue with what you were doing without distractions.

In GTD we name those things we have captured and are still not processed as “stuff”. And we do it on purpose, to denote their abstract nature, since we haven’t yet paused to think what they really are—although we may have a preconceived idea. Then, when you are processing or clarifying your stuff, the key question is “Is there any action required?”

One day in 1927 Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian student of psychology at the University of Berlin, went along with several classmates and teachers to have dinner at a restaurant in town. When the waiter who served them took the order of all the diners with absolutely nothing to write in, as he did with the rest of the tables, she thought it was going to end badly. However, after a while the waiter served everyone exactly what they ordered.

One of the most common mistakes when implementing GTD, not only at the beginning but also after having practiced the method for a long time, is the tendency to mix the stages of collecting and processing (or capturing and clarifying, as David Allen call them in his recent review and update of the GTD book.)

Collecting is the first stage of any kind of organizational work flow. In order to gain control, you need to gather everything that you consider somehow incomplete. The basic principle is that you must know how your world is right now, how the map in which you move looks like, so that you can make a positive commitment to it.