The basic idea behind GTD is to write down all of your open loops – every single project or task that you feel responsible – in a system outside of your own head. Getting Things Done (the extremely abbreviated version) So I decided to write this post with tips on how to GTD for those of us who missed out on the naturally-having-all-your-life-together gene. Nevertheless, I refuse to believe that I’m somehow fundamentally incapable of Getting Things Done. They might need some advice to tweak their workflow here or there, but for the most part they’re already organized and productive human beings.

The problem with most of the GTD advice I found is that it’s written by people who are naturally pretty good at having their life together. Why is it that I can’t seem to maintain GTD for longer than a month? What can I do about it? I sit down and spend a few hours braindumping all of my open tasks into my task manager, assigning and rescheduling dates, adding all my context labels like a good GTDer.Īfter going through this stressful cycle for the umpteenth time, I finally started asking myself what I was doing wrong. After that, I start dropping the ball on my recurring tasks, which just makes things worse.Įventually – after much guilt and a missed deadline or two – I reach a breaking point. The number of overdue tasks in my Todoist projects slowly ticks up to panic-inducing levels.Īt around 50 overdue tasks, I close out of Todoist on my Mac to avoid seeing the number of things I’m not doing every time I open my computer. Maybe.īut inevitably my to-do lists begin to scare me. I might maintain my GTD system for a couple of weeks, maybe even a couple months if I don’t have too much going on.

Like many, I’ve attempted to follow David Allen’s famous Getting Things Done or GTD productivity method too many times to count.

Todoist and gtd