Getting Things Done (book)

✒️ Note-Making

🔗Connect

🔼Topic:: Triage

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas How to act in a productive way to make sure your mind stays clear and focused on creativity, on enjoying life and on what matters most. The GTD is focused on emptying your mind, brining clarity on your "next task" in each one of your project, and general upkeep and maintenance of things that are pilling up in your todo list.

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen?

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... This book has a lot of irrelevant parts. unnecessary examples, repetitive, and it just might be that the book wasn't written for me, maybe for those who feel that they are stuck. Also this book is "old" and its showing, advising us to use a secretary and work with physical inbox etc.

Also, there's not a lot of added value compared to videos' that you can find for free online.

🖼️Outline

📒 Notes

Intro

an attempt to convince us in the necessity of the logic behind the GTD system. 13% of the book to tell us the "our minds are clouded by thoughts, pressure, commitments and information" and that it makes our life hard. our mind is a processor and not a warehouse

Welcome to Getting Things Done

• It is possible to be effectively doing while you are delightfully being, in your ordinary workaday world.
• The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
• Anxiety is caused by a lack of control, organization, preparation, and action.

Part 1 - The Art of Getting Things Done

Systematical Thinking

We have taken more than we could chew. The amount of information, tasks, roles and conversations we have to do is simply overwhelming. We need a system in order to function, something that would reduce our cognitive load, and help us bring clarity to our life.

GTD is a bottoms-up approach, because there's no point in talking about grand visions if your day-to-day is chaotic without any room for relaxation. The main goal of GTD is defining what done looks like, and how to get there. The rest our system will handle and make sure we're on the right track.

The steps are:

1. Capture
2. Clarify
3. Organize
4. Reflect
5. Engage

Once you bring order to your thoughts, you get freedom to think, to be creative, to see the larger picture, and to perform productively.

A New Practice for a New Reality

• (1) capturing all the things that might need to get done or have usefulness for you—now, later, someday, big, little, or in between—in a logical and trusted system outside your head and off your mind; (2) directing yourself to make front-end decisions about all of the “inputs” you let into your life so that you will always have a workable inventory of “next actions” that you can implement or renegotiate in the moment; and (3) curating and coordinating all of that content, utilizing the recognition of the multiple levels of commitments with yourself and others you will have at play, at any point in time.
• not only are work and its cognitive boundaries more ambiguous and ill defined, so are the time and space within which we can (and often should) be engaged with it, along with the continuing explosion of potentially meaningful and accessible data that could add value to our lives.
• We’re allowing in huge amounts of information and communication from the outer world and generating an equally large volume of ideas and agreements with others and ourselves from the inner world. And we haven’t been well equipped to deal with this huge number of internal and external commitments.
• Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.
• You must use your mind to get things off your mind.
• People think a lot, but most of that thinking is of a problem, project, or situation—not about it.
• Even if you’ve already decided on the next step you’ll take to resolve a problem, your mind can’t let go until and unless you park a reminder in a place it knows you will, without fail, look. It will keep pressuring you about that untaken next step, usually when you can’t do anything about it, which will just add to your stress.
• The vast majority of people have been trying to get organized by rearranging incomplete lists of unclear things;
• you’ll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind. And the way to do that, as we’ve seen, is not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities.
• the key to managing all of your stuff is managing your actions.
• the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what associated next-action steps are required.
• Getting things done requires two basic components: defining (1) what “done” means (outcome) and (2) what “doing” looks like (action).
• people are so embroiled in commitments on a day-to-day level that their ability to focus successfully on the larger horizon is seriously impaired. Consequently, a bottom-up approach is usually more effective.
• Horizontal control maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved.
• Vertical control, in contrast, manages thinking, development, and coordination of individual topics and projects.

Getting Control of Your Life: The Five Steps of Mastering Workflow

• We (1) capture what has our attention; (2) clarify what each item means and what to do about it; (3) organize the results, which presents the options we (4) reflect on, which we then choose to (5) engage with.
• Most people have major weaknesses in their (1) capture process. Most of their commitments to do something are still in their head. The number of coulds, shoulds, might-want-tos, and ought-tos they generate in their minds are way out beyond what they have recorded anywhere else.
• Many have collected lots of things but haven’t (2) clarified exactly what they represent or decided what action, if any, to take about them. Random lists strewn everywhere, meeting notes, vague to-dos on Post-its on their refrigerator or computer screens or in their Tasks function in a digital tool—all lie not acted on and numbing to the psyche in their effect. Those lists alone often create more stress than they relieve.
• Others make good decisions about stuff in the moment but lose the value of that thinking because they don’t efficiently (3) organize the results.
• Still others have good systems but don’t (4) reflect on the contents consistently enough to keep them functional. They may have lists, plans, and various checklists available to them (created by capturing, clarifying, and organizing), but they don’t keep them current or access them to their advantage.
• Finally, if any one of these previous links is weak, what someone is likely to choose to (5) engage in at any point in time may not be the best option.
• In order for your mind to let go of the lower-level task of trying to hang on to everything, you have to know that you have truly captured everything that might represent something you have to do or at least decide about, and that at some point in the near future you will process and review all of it.
• A task left undone remains undone in two places—at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they gnaw at your conscience.
• In order to manage this inventory of open loops appropriately, you need to capture it into “containers” that hold items in abeyance until you have a few moments to decide what they are and what, if anything, you’re going to do about them. Then you must empty these containers regularly to ensure that they remain viable capture tools.
• 1  |  Every open loop must be in your capture system and out of your head. 2  |  You must have as few capturing buckets as you can get by with. 3  |  You must empty them regularly.
• These collection tools should become part of your lifestyle. Keep them close by so no matter where you are you can collect a potentially valuable thought—think
• Emptying the contents does not mean that you have to finish what’s there; it just means that you have to decide more specifically what it is and what should be done with it, and if it’s still unfinished, organize it into your system.
• You can’t organize what’s incoming—you can only capture it and process it. Instead, you organize the actions you’ll need to take based on the decisions you’ve made about what needs to be done.
• The “next action” is the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality of this thing toward completion.
• 1. Do it. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined. 2. Delegate it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, Am I the right person to do this? If the answer is no, delegate it to the appropriate entity. 3. Defer it, If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are the right person to do it, you will have to defer acting on it until later and track it on one or more “Next Actions” lists.
• To manage actionable things, you will need a list of projects, storage or files for project plans and materials, a calendar, a list of reminders of next actions, and a list of reminders of things you’re waiting for.
• I define a project as any desired result that can be accomplished within a year that requires more than one action step.
• You don’t actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it “done.”
• Your Projects list will be merely an index. All of the details, plans, and supporting information that you may need as you work on your various projects should be contained in separate file folders, computer files, notebooks, or binders.
• What does need to be tracked is every action that has to happen at a specific time or on a specific day
• the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all. The only rewriting should be for changed appointments.
• There are two kinds of incubation tools that could work for this kind of thing: Someday/Maybe lists and a tickler system.
• Someday/Maybe It can be useful and inspiring to maintain an ongoing list of things you might want to do at some point but not now. This is the “parking lot” for projects that would be impossible to move on at present but that you don’t want to forget about entirely.
• The lack of a good general-reference file can be one of the biggest bottlenecks in implementing an efficient personal management system. If filing and storing isn’t easy and fast (and even fun!), you’ll tend to stack, pile, or digitally accumulate things instead of putting them away appropriately.
• You need to be able to step back and review the whole picture of your life and work from a broader perspective as well as drop down “into the weeds” of concrete actions to take, as needed, and at appropriate intervals.
• Projects, Waiting For, and Someday/Maybe lists need to be reviewed only as often as you think they have to be in order to stop you from wondering about them.
• All of your Projects, active project plans, and Next Actions, Agendas, Waiting For, and even Someday/Maybe lists should be reviewed once a week.
• The Weekly Review is the time to: Gather and process all your stuff. Review your system. Update your lists. Get clean, clear, current, and complete.
• The basic purpose of this workflow-management process is to facilitate good choices about what you’re doing at any point in time.
• how do you choose what to do? At that moment there are four criteria you can apply, in this order: context, time available, energy available, and priority. The first three describe the constraints within which you continually operate, and the fourth provides the hierarchical values to ascribe to your actions.
• Horizon 5: Purpose and principles Horizon 4: Vision Horizon 3: Goals Horizon 2: Areas of focus and accountabilities Horizon 1: Current projects Ground: Current actions

Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of

• THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are (1) clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and (2) reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly.
• when people do more planning, informally and naturally, they relieve a great deal of stress and obtain better results.
• 1  |  Defining purpose and principles 2  |  Outcome visioning 3  |  Brainstorming 4  |  Organizing 5  |  Identifying next actions
• You have an urge to make something happen; you imagine the outcome; you generate ideas that might be relevant; you sort those into a structure; and you define a physical activity that would begin to make it a reality.
• “What’s a good idea?” is a good question, but only when you’re about 80 percent of the way through your thinking! Starting there would probably blow anyone’s creative mental fuses.
• It never hurts to ask the why question. Almost anything you’re currently doing can be enhanced and even galvanized by more scrutiny at this top level of focus.
• To know and to be clear about the purpose of any activity are prime directives for appropriate focus, creative development, and cooperation.
• Here are just some of the benefits of asking why: It defines success. It creates decision-making criteria. It aligns resources. It motivates. It clarifies focus. It expands options.
• Purpose defines success. It’s the primal reference point for any investment of time and energy,
• if you don’t really know when you’ve met your purpose or when you’re off track, you don’t have a viable directive.
• Whereas purpose provides the juice and the direction, principles define the parameters of action and the criteria for excellence of conduct.
• Purpose and principles furnish the impetus and the monitoring, but vision provides the actual blueprint of the final result. This is the what instead of the why.
• give yourself permission to capture and express any idea, and then later on figure out how it fits in and what to do with it.
• The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can help generate many new ones that might not have occurred to you if you didn’t have a mechanism to hold your thoughts and continually reflect them back to you.
• Many techniques can be used to facilitate brainstorming and out-of-the-box thinking. The basic principles, however, can be summed up as follows: Don’t judge, challenge, evaluate, or criticize. Go for quantity, not quality. Put analysis and organization in the background.
• once you get all the ideas out of your head and in front of your eyes, you’ll automatically notice natural relationships and structure.
• The Basics of Organizing The key steps here are: Identify the significant pieces Sort by (one or more): components sequences priorities Detail to the required degree
• A project is sufficiently planned for implementation when every next-action step has been decided on every front that can actually be moved on without some other component’s having to be completed first.
• In general, the reason things are on your mind is that the outcome and action step(s) have not been appropriately defined, and/or reminders of them have not been put in places where you can be trusted to look for them appropriately. Additionally, you may not have developed the details, perspectives, and solutions sufficiently to trust the efficacy of your blueprint.
• you must be responsible for collecting all your open loops, applying a front-end thought process to each of them, and managing the results with organization, review, and action.

Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space, and Tools

• it takes a lot of mental energy to capture and make decisions about such a large inventory of open loops, especially when they’ve been open, undecided, or stuck for way too long.
• You need to use your system—not continually have to re-create it.
• You can work virtually anywhere if you have a clean, compact system and know how to process your stuff rapidly and portably.
• Besides being fast, the system needs to be fun and easy, current and complete.
• Even digitally, it is very helpful to have a visual map sorted in ways that make sense—either by indexes or data groups organized effectively, usually in an alpha format.
• The biggest issue for digitally oriented people is that the ease of capturing and storing has generated a write-only syndrome: all they’re doing is capturing information—not actually accessing and using it intelligently.

Part 2 - Practicing Stress-Free Productivity

Capture

we want to capture all the ideas, thoughts and unfinished chores that are valuable to us. The capture device can be digital or analogical, and is recommended to have few devices as possible. To make it effective device tool, it must:

1. be always available
2. easy to use
3. easy to search/review and empty once in a while

whatever we don't capture stays in our brain, which adds to our cognitive load, creating pressure and confusion.

Capturing: Corralling Your “Stuff”

• 1  |  it’s helpful to have a sense of the volume of stu you have to deal with; 2  |  it lets you know where the “end of the tunnel” is; and 3  |  when you’re clarifying and organizing, you don’t want to be distracted psychologically by an amorphous mass of stuff that might still be “somewhere.” Once you have all the things that require your attention gathered in one place, you’ll automatically be operating from a state of enhanced focus and control.
• Once you feel you’ve collected all the physical things in your environment that need processing, you’ll want to collect anything else that may be residing in your mental RAM space. What has your attention that isn’t represented by something already in your in-tray?

Clarify

Process what you've captured. Break it down into meaningful tasks, think about the logical "next step" needed, what is it's goal and what to do about it.

Clarifying: Getting “In” to Empty

• Getting “in” to empty doesn’t mean actually doing all the actions and projects that you’ve captured. It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you’re going to do with it.
• Process the top item first. Process one item at a time. Never put anything back into “in.”

Organize

Organize what you captured (follow the chart in the drawing) Briefly:

1. Capture the information and decide if it is actionable:
   1. if not - put in a someday, reference or trash
   2. if yes - can it be done in 2 minutes?
      1. if yes - do it
      2. if not - either delegate (to someone else), or defer it
         1. if deferred - either put in your calendar (when you are going to do it), or put in the "next steps" pile

Organizing: Setting Up the Right Buckets

• Being organized means nothing more or less than where something is matches what it means to you.
• There are seven primary types of things that you’ll want to keep track of and manage from an organizational and operational perspective: A Projects list Project support material Calendar actions and information Next Actions lists A Waiting For list Reference material A Someday/Maybe list
• The list is just a way for you to keep track of the total inventory of active things to which you have made a commitment, and to have that inventory available for review.
• You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day’s commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance while you’re on the run. That’ll be much easier if the only things in there are those that you absolutely have to get done, or know about, on that day.
• common list headings for next actions will make sense for you: Calls At Computer Errands At Office (miscellaneous) At Home Anywhere Agendas (for people and meetings) Read/Review
• your calendar, action lists, and any unexpected tasks that come up will constitute your tactical and immediate focus. Remember, you can’t do a project; you can only do the action steps it requires.
• The real value of the Projects list lies in the complete review it can provide (at least once a week), ensuring that you have action steps defined for all of your projects and that nothing is slipping through the cracks.
• you don’t want to use support materials as your primary reminders of what to do—that should be relegated to your action lists.
• the huge assortment of options for digital project support is the ease with which we are seduced into spreading potentially meaningful information into such a multiplicity of locations and mechanisms that it can take us almost back to square one: we don’t know where it all is, can’t see it all integrated for appropriate overviewing from the right perspective at the right time, aren’t sure exactly how to put what data where . . . so we wind up trying to keep it all coordinated back in our heads!
• Distinguishing actionable from nonactionable things is the first key success factor in this arena. Second is determining what your potential use of the information is, and therefore where and how it should be stored.
• There is no “perfect” reference system. Its structures and content demand a highly individual decision that ought to be based on the ratio of the value received to the time and effort required for capturing and maintaining it.
• whenever you have to think about anything, either because of some regularity of a refreshed view (“At the end of every calendar year, I want/need to . . .”) or a specific situation that requires more detail than you can easily recall (“Before I deliver a seminar, I need to . . .”), you should entrust those jobs to your “external mind”—your management system that holds the details you need to engage with at appropriate times.*

Reflect

During the day work mainly with your calendar, since it defines your anchors and your timed chores along the day. If you have free time, use your "next actions" list. Once a week, go over all your lists, your projects, the captures, next missions and someday tasks and make sure everything is clean and organized. Periodical Review

Reflecting: Keeping It All Fresh and Functional

• Reviewing your system on a regular basis, reflecting on the contents, and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for that kind of clarity and stability.
• your system cannot be static. In order to support appropriate action choices, it must be kept up-to-date. And it should trigger consistent and appropriate evaluation of your life and work at several horizons.
• Your personal system and behaviors need to be established in such a way that you can see all the action options you need to see, when you need to see them.
• my lists are in one sense my office.
• After you review all your day- and time-specific commitments and handle whatever you need to about them, your next most frequent area for review will be the lists of all the actions you could possibly do in your current context.
• The real trick to ensuring the trustworthiness of the whole organization system lies in regularly refreshing your thinking and your system from a more elevated perspective. That’s impossible to do, however, if your lists fall too far behind your reality.
• That whirlwind of activity is precisely what makes the Weekly Review so valuable. It builds in some capturing, reevaluation, and reprocessing time to keep you in balance.
• get clear, get current, and get creative. Getting clear will ensure that all your collected stuff is processed. Getting current will ensure that all your orienting “maps” or lists are reviewed and up-to-date. The creative part happens to some degree automatically, as you get clear and current—you will naturally be generating ideas and perspectives that will be adding value to your thinking about work and life.
• The Weekly Review is so critical that it behooves you to establish good habits, environments, and tools to support it.

Engage

How Should You Prioritize Tasks?

1. context - each action requires you to be in a certain place/time, having access to resources, etc...
2. Time - do you have enough time right now to preform this task?
3. Energy - some tasks are more mentally or physically exhausting than others. Choose tasks according to your level of energy
4. Urgency - how important it is to finish it now?

Engaging: Making the Best Action Choices

• These first three criteria for choosing action (context, time, and energy) bespeak the need for a complete next-action reminder system. Much of the time you won’t be in a mode to do that kind of coordinated and organized thinking; it needs to have already been done.
• It’s easy to get seduced into “busy” and “urgent” mode, especially when you have a lot of unprocessed and relatively out-of-control work
• The challenge is to feel confident about what you have decided to do. So how do you decide? This again will involve your intuitive judgments—how important is the unexpected work, against all the rest? How long can you let your in-tray go unprocessed and all your stuff unreviewed and trust that you’re making good decisions about what to do?
• The primary reason to work from this bottom-up direction is that it clears your inner decks to begin with, allowing your creative attention to focus on the more meaningful and elusive visions that you may need to challenge yourself to identify.
• the most important thing to deal with is whatever is most on your mind. The fact that you think it shouldn’t be on your mind is irrelevant.
• Although a bottom-up approach is not a conceptual priority, from a practical perspective it’s a critical factor in achieving a balanced, productive, and comfortable life.
• Few people are doing only what they were hired to do, and keeping clear about new and changing expectations needs to be a constantly updated conversation.

Project Planning

The Planning should be natural, top down oriented. You must define the:

1. goal (the "why")
2. our values (our limitations and rules)
3. the vision (the desired situation)
4. the OKR (actual targets)
5. the actions necessary to fulfil our goals

A project is everything continues up to a year that takes more than one action. Projects shouldn't be where you store the information, just an organizing structure for your actions. The information should be stored outside since it might be relevant for other projects.

Getting Projects Under Control

• the biggest improvement opportunity in planning does not consist of techniques for the highly elaborate and complex kinds of project organizing
• You need to set up systems and tricks that get you to think about your projects and situations more frequently, more easily, and more in depth.
• Keep good writing tools around all the time so you never have any unconscious resistance to thinking due to not having anything to capture it with.

The Power of the Key Principles

The filing system should be easy to use, accessible and at hand. You should keep the internal logic intact, things should be labeled. Once a year you should do a "house cleaning", deleting what's irrelevant. The cleaner and smaller the system, the easier it will be to use.

Everything should be included in the system. Have an inbox where you go over everything you need to sort and organize. If it wont include everything, that you wont be able to trust your system, and therefore your mind wont really be empty since it will try and think of what are you still missing.

Your overall structure should be:

1. list of projects
2. list of next actions
3. someday actions
4. follow up actions
5. information vault
6. inbox

Calendar

Use your calendar not only for daily meetings but as the central focal point for managing your life. This is what you are going to look at daily, so everything that requires your attention at a given moment, put it in the calendar. make sure to add remainders. At the start of your day, look at the calendar, this is your overall structure for the day, and add other tasks as possible.

Weekly Review

the system will be helpful if it will surface the right information at the right time. since reality is moving faster than we can manage on the daily basis, we must have a weekly require. This is essential to close up the previous week and getting ready for next week.

1. Go over our completed tasks and meetings, and see that there are no loose ends or any follow up tasks.
2. make sure your inbox is clean and organized.
3. go over your next tasks and see that you are ready,
4. go over your someday task and follow up tasks, see if any need modification
5. prepare your priorities for the following week.

Workload Handling

To handle the workload, we have to do one of three: Eisenhower matrix

1. Say no (reduce obligations)
2. Do
3. Adjust - make the obligation less demanding

Goal Setting

goal setting is important as long as it is connect to present tasks. Having ordered goals is only possible after organizing your tasks - i.e "a sinking ship doesn't matter where its headed". (although In the long run our goals affect our daily workload). Life's Mission

Figuring out the "next task"

Every project requires to distill what it the actual next step, as small and as clear as it may be. Figuring out the actual next step gives us:

1. Clarity - we know what we should do
2. Accountability - we know who should do it
3. Productivity - a more useful allocation of resources at any giving moment
4. Empowering - we feel successful and satisfied by finishing things on time before they escalate.

The Power of the Capturing Habit

• Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements—they’re the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust.
• when you really take on the responsibility to capture and track what’s on your mind, you’ll think twice about making commitments internally that you don’t really need or want to make.
• anything that is held only in your head will take up either more or less attention than it deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important; it’s that it’s not.

The Power of the Next-Action Decision

• Complaining is a sign that someone isn’t willing to risk moving on a changeable situation, or won’t consider the immutable circumstance in his or her plans.

The Power of Outcome Focusing

• You can’t really define the right action until you know the outcome you’re after, and your outcome is disconnected from reality if you’re not clear about what you need to do physically to make it happen.
• without challenges, you would never learn or grow.
• the basic five-step process of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging is a coherent way to achieve stability across the whole spectrum of your life, natural planning produces relaxed, focused control in more specific areas.

GTD and Cognitive Science

• your mind is designed to have ideas, based upon pattern detection, but it isn’t designed to remember much of anything! Because of the way the mind developed, it is brilliant at recognition, but terrible at recall.

The Path of GTD Mastery

• Mastery does not refer to some final end state of a Zen-like peacefulness and enlightenment on a mountaintop (though that could be an optional nice expression of it). Rather, it’s the demonstrated ability to consistently engage in productive behaviors as a means to achieve clarity, stability, and focus when it’s desired or required—no matter what the challenge.