David Allen's Getting Things Done: Open Loops, Mind Like Water and GTD

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

David Allen's 2001 book Getting Things Done presents productivity as a way to reach a stress-free mind. Allen argues that unfinished commitments, which he calls open loops, incompletes or simply stuff, crowd working memory and reduce what people accomplish. He borrows the martial arts image of a mind like water, which responds to a pebble or a boulder in proportion and then returns to calm. His core exercise is to write down one open loop's successful outcome in a sentence and then its next physical action. The method has five stages, capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage, and needs only an inbox, a trash can, reference files, lists and a calendar.

Emptying the inbox means deciding what each item is, not doing it all. Non-actionable items go to the trash, a someday maybe list or reference. Multi-step outcomes become projects with a defined next action, tasks under two minutes get done immediately, delegated items go on a waiting for list, and the calendar is kept for date-specific commitments. Next actions are sorted by context, such as at computer or errands, and a weekly review keeps the system trusted. In 2008 cognitive scientists Francis Heylighen and Clément Vidal analyzed GTD as distributed cognition in the journal Long Range Planning.

• Allen often advises beginners to start with a paper system to learn the process before using software.
• GTD works bottom up, taking control of daily actions before considering the higher horizons of focus up to life purpose.
• Heylighen and Vidal noted that human memory works by association, so reminders surface at the wrong time and place.
• Wired called GTD a new cult for the info age, and it spread through blogs such as 43 Folders and Lifehacker and on The Howard Stern Show.
• James Fallows wrote in The Atlantic that GTD lets people feel at peace with what they are not doing at any moment.