Tag: “Clarify”

In this article I will use the word “work” in the way it is used in GTD, that is, understood as anything you’ve committed to do, either in personal or professional contexts.

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.)

Updated and expanded in May 2024.

Processing is the stage of the GTD workflow in which you make decisions. You get all the stuff you have collected and, one by one, decide what are you going to do with them.