How I made GTD work for me, and how maybe you can too.
For something as boring as a productivity system, David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) gets a lot of hate. I’ve lost count of the amount of people who’ve told me they started GTD, didn’t get on with it, and then gave up. But now with an added sense of inadequacy: not only were they overwhelmed, they were terrible at getting productive. They got a whole new complex, and they didn’t even get anything done.
However there are a rare few people who do seem to get on with GTD. You’ve probably bumped into them in the office. Freaks who seem preternaturally calm, who always know what they’re doing. Who’s entire life runs smoothly on good organisation. I’ve talked to a few of them, and they hate GTD as well. They just take the parts that work for them, and make something work.
If you ask me after a couple of drinks I think that this — the fact that millions of people struggle to improve their productivity — means something. But that’s an idea for a different post.
Anyway, since I’m no cleverer or insightful than other people, I’m going to do exactly what everyone else has done. That is: tell you how I made GTD work for me. I guess figuring out how to do knowledge work efficiently is hard. And that’s why so few people are any good at it.
I think GTD is overrated, but has three important components:
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Record.
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Retrieve & Review.
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Reflect.
The rest of this post will go into how I made GTD work and maybe what you could do to make it work for you.
Record.
The most important thing about productivity is to write everything down. And by everything, I mean everything. Find a piece of paper and spend a couple of hours writing down everything in every area of your life that your need to do. David Allen charges 100k to hand his clients a piece of paper and tell them this. I’m telling you for free, so think of this like a favour.
Did you do it? Doesn’t it feel better? Allen calls this resultant state ‘mind like water,’ but you can feel any way you want with my system.
As long as you write everything down.
Where you write things down doesn’t really matter. It can be on your phone, in Drafts, or Evernote, or the native notes app. You could be all fancy and use a physical notebook. Or even talk into your apple watch and use Machine Learning to turn it into text. Whatever.
Capturing all the things you need to do in some inbox is the foundation. If there’s one thing to take from this post it’s: write down what you’ve got to do. Ever had something that’s second tier important to do but forgot to do it? Start writing those things down. If you can’t recall what you need to do, you’re not going to do it. And that starts with capturing your todos.
Retrieve & Review
After a little time — honestly take as long as you want, it took me three months to really get everything I need to do out of my head — writing things down you’ll start to notice you’re system getting clogged up. You’re mixing work todos with things you have to pick up from the supermarket and dental appointments in six months time. It’s time to level up.
It’s time to use a task manager.
Ok. Ok. Ok. That sounds way more dramatic for what is essentially a database and a calendar. But once you find one that works for you it’s life changing. The point isn’t to manage your tasks, but to build a system that you trust. Once you find something that works for you this will take a huge persistent anxiety off your shoulders. You won’t have to worry about forgetting important things, and you won’t have the secondary drag of not feeling good enough.
I use Roam Research as my all in one task manager and note-taking app. I use Drafts and the native Roam app for quick capture when I’m on the go or need to write something down quickly at work Then I have a TODO on my daily notes page to go through Drafts. (The stuff in Quick Capture appears automatically on the daily notes page).
The purpose of inbox capture (step 1) is to create tasks in a task manager. The best time to do this is every day. So I keep on top of the things I need to do pretty easily. Why? Because I write everything down, and then send it to a single place.
I’ve kind of cheated with my acronym here, and added a step 2b here. Once you have a set of inboxes you’re checking, and a task manager to put them in, you have to decide where in your task manager to put them. This is a mini-review.
Now you might think that reviewing tasks comes after you’ve done them, not before. But there are two separate types of reviewing: deciding where a task belongs, and then thinking about how you could do similar tasks better in future. I call the second kind of review reflection, because it makes a nice acronym.
The first kind of reviewing comes when you process your inboxes. You see, some tasks belong together. That is they live in projects. Projects are a sequence of tasks, together with a deadline. The harder the deadline, the more likely that the project will get done. Basically every task manager has functionality to group similar tasks together. So figure out how to create projects in whichever one you’ve chosen. In Roam, each project has it’s own page and all tasks associated with that project are collected there. Then I just have a global projects page with links to the individual projects on it.
The advantage of having a named page is I can create project-specific tags on each of my task blocks, wherever I create the task.
Why is that an advantage?
Well, there is a mindset shift that you go through when you use Roam. And it means you absolutely cannot go back to using anything else if this deeply vibes with you. You start off using roam by creating lots of pages, and doing all of your work on those pages. You basically ignore the daily notes page.
Then you read that Roam’s data model is block based. I.e. all the little bullet points are their own record, not the page. This is how all the ‘linked references’ end up at the bottom of the page. So you realise that it doesn’t matter where you do your work: Roam hoovers up all the blocks on the other pages where you mention this one. For example, if I tag something for next Monday on today’s page, then next Monday that something appears on next Monday’s page.
So you can shard tasks across time and across projects basically any way you want to. As long as that task is somewhere in your graph, you will have a way of retrieving it.
(Let me tell you this: having a task you’ve forgotten about appear on your daily notes page, one that you absolutely must do today is hugely satisfying. It’s like having a better brain.)
Your system for retrieving all of your tasks will be deeply personal to you, based on your projects and your interests and your whole life. But Roam gives you the tools through the [[]] and the # operators and block references to build anything you want. So go crazy.
Personally I’ve created a #next tag and a whole load of different context tags that can go together with #next. The most important ones are #do and #due, which combine with the linked references so that tasks from my projects appear on the correct daily notes page. That way I keep on top of when I need to do what I need to do.
How? Roam has a bunch of fancy capabilities for querying and I hoover up tasks with those. I also explicitly check the next actions inboxes daily, so that all the projects are moving forward.
So, in your task manager, set up projects as a collection of tasks with a deadline. Create some context tags to filter the tasks by context on the main view (probably the calendar or daily view).
Reflect
The final part of GTD that’s actually useful is reflection. This is where you go back over what you’ve done, and think about whether you did it well, or could do it better. The weekly review is a cornerstone habit that basically nobody ever does. That’s because it’s usually a painful reminder of all the things you haven’t done, that life is slipping away from you, and that one day you will die and your dreams may be permanently unfulfilled.
There’s no nice way to do reviews, but by doing them. Fortunately, they take like 20 minutes. All it really involves is checking all your projects are ticking along, that you’ve not promised something to someone, and that there’s no untagged tasks slipping through the cracks. Then you can look at any projects you’ve closed and think about ways to do similar tasks better in the future.
I set up a task to appear on every Friday’s daily note page, and I just go through the next actions for my projects. I do mine first thing on a Friday.
I can’t go too much into detail about how I’ve implemented this in Roam, but I can say that R. J. Nestor’s AP Productivity course is well worth your time!