What is GTD System

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a best-selling book about the time management method created by David Allen to increase productivity by organizing your idea to life. It looks like a complex system at first, but once you’ve got the hang of it, you’ll be doing the things you want to do in a much more effective way.

Workflow

GTD is a system to organize your thoughts into action. It doesn’t put rules around how you do it. Instead, it focuses on how you capture what you need to do, organize it, and choose what needs your attention.

Basically, the GTD workflow consists of five stages: capture, process, organize, review, and engage.

1 Capture

Capture everything, ideas, tasks, projects, to-do items, everything. Wherever that information comes from, you need to capture it and put it in whatever device you choose to be it a notebook, to-do app, binder.

2 Clarify

Once you’ve captured everything, the next step is to clarify all the items you have to do. To clarify, you must ask the following question:

• Is it actionable?
• Does it need a single step to complete?
• Does it take more than 2 minutes?
• Does it take more than a person to complete it?
• Does it have a specific time or a deadline?

3 Organize

Then after clarifying each item, it’s time to organize those by category and priority. There are three basic categories which are an action list, a to-do list, and a calendar. But as there are no specific rules, you can add the category to your liking, for example:

• Throw it in the trash (if the item isn’t actionable)
• Someday/maybe list (if it’s not visible to complete it in the near future)
• Reference filing (if it isn’t actionable but still have value)
• To-do list (if it requires more than one step to complete it)
• Immediately completed (if it can be done under 2 minutes)
• Waiting (if the task is delegated to someone else or waiting for a response from other parties)
• Action list (if there is only need one step to complete it)
• Calendar (if the item has the specific time or a deadline)

4 Review

Once a week, review your items and make an adjustment if needed. Are your actions moving the project toward your goal? Or just run stagnant? A weekly review is essential to keep everything running smoothly.

5 Engage

Now that you’ve set your list of items to each category and priority, you know what to do next right? Because it’s time to get it to work reaching your goal according to the plan you’ve set beforehand.

Final Words

There is no such thing as a perfect system because each and every one of us has different habits and preferences. That’s why it needs an adjustment appropriate to the user. But then again this is just the basic, the actual book offers more tips and methods that you can apply to your specific needs.