Overview
David Allen's GTD methodology has become the gold standard for personal and professional organization. Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
Allen, a management consultant, published Getting Things Done in 2001. The book's system — capture everything in trusted inboxes, clarify each item, organise by context, review weekly, engage with confidence — became the dominant productivity methodology of the 2000s and spawned an ecosystem of software tools (OmniFocus, Things, Todoist) built around its concepts. Allen updated the book in 2015 to reflect changes in technology.
Key Ideas
Capture Everything
Get every task and commitment out of your head and into a trusted system.
The Two-Minute Rule
If an action can be completed in two minutes or less, do it immediately.
Define Next Actions
For every project, identify the very next physical action required.
Who should read this
Knowledge workers drowning in commitments across too many channels (email, Slack, meetings, paper, memory) who need a single reliable system. GTD is the most thoroughly developed personal-productivity methodology ever published, and the second edition is the definitive reference.
Who might skip it
Skip if you've tried GTD before and bounced off; the system has a high setup cost and many people cannot maintain the weekly review that makes it work. Skip also if your work is genuinely simple enough not to need it — there's no virtue in over-systematising.
The verdict
The most robust productivity system I know of, but only for readers willing to commit to the full practice. Half-hearted GTD is usually worse than a simple list, because the overhead of maintaining contexts and inboxes outweighs the benefits of having them. When it works, though, it really works — my entire professional life ran on GTD for six years.
"Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them."
— David Allen, Getting Things Done
If you liked this
Making It All Work, Allen's follow-up on the thinking behind the system. For a lighter alternative, The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll.