METHODS / FOCUS AND WORKLOAD / GETTING THINGS DONE
METHOD
Getting Things Done
Getting Things Done, often shortened to GTD, is David Allen's personal workflow for turning requests, ideas, and commitments into current choices. It uses five stages: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage.
OFFICIAL SOURCE David Allen Company
Work arriving through email, meetings, chat, notes, and other systems, especially when commitments depend on memory or delegated follow-up becomes difficult to track.
GTD can organize work that has been accepted. It cannot decide the organization's priorities or make an overloaded workload fit.
WHAT IT IS
How the five stages turn incoming work into a usable system.
Capture collects what has your attention into a small number of trusted places. Clarify decides what each item means and whether action is required. Organize places the reminder in the appropriate view. Reflect brings those views back up to date. Engage means choosing what to do from current information.
The method depends on review. A project list, action list, calendar, or delegated-work list stops helping when it no longer reflects current commitments.
FIT
When GTD is useful.
Reach for it when
- Requests arrive through several channels and depend on memory or repeated inbox searches.
- Projects are listed as broad topics with no visible next action.
- Delegated items disappear between meetings.
- You need one personal control layer across several shared systems.
Use another approach when
- A team needs one shared view of capacity and flow. Use a team workflow such as Kanban.
- Leadership has not resolved which priorities matter.
- The work requires a regulated case record or formal audit trail.
- Accepted work already exceeds available capacity. Renegotiate commitments first.
HOW TO RUN IT
Move the work through five stages.
THE WORKING SYSTEM
What needs to remain current.
These are functional views. They do not require a particular app or a separate system for every list.
- Capture points and the cadence for processing them
- Active projects and their intended outcomes
- Next visible actions
- Waiting For items and follow-up points
- Date-specific calendar commitments
- Deferred possibilities and reference material
EXAMPLE
Keeping a board request from disappearing.
An Executive Business Partner leaves a leadership meeting with a request to prepare the Q3 board update. The board update becomes a project. Requesting the revenue bridge from Finance becomes the next action. The request moves to Waiting For after Finance accepts it. The confirmed board deadline stays on the calendar.
During the next review, the missing revenue bridge remains visible before it can delay the packet.
KEEP IT USEFUL
Common implementation and shared-work considerations.
Common implementation issues
- Capturing work in so many places that none of them is reliable.
- Copying an entire message into a task without clarifying the next action.
- Treating the calendar as a list of hoped-for completion dates.
- Skipping review until the system becomes another backlog.
- Using organization as a substitute for reducing or renegotiating work.
Shared-work considerations
- Reconcile personal reminders with the team's official project, decision, or client record.
- Agree on how verbal executive commitments are confirmed before they become accepted work.
- Keep confidential material in systems with the right access controls.
- Adjust the method for role expectations, accessibility, and individual working preference.
- State who may accept, decline, delegate, or change a commitment.
AI AND JUDGMENT
Use AI to surface possible commitments. People decide what is real and where it belongs.
AI can help
- Extract candidate commitments from approved messages, notes, or transcripts.
- Suggest a next action or project outcome for review.
- Group captured items and prepare a review list.
- Flag delegated items that have no owner, follow-up point, or recent update.
People remain responsible for
- Confirming whether a commitment was made at all.
- Deciding the owner, meaning, priority, and official destination.
- Resolving conflicts between personal reminders and shared records.
- Accepting, declining, delegating, or renegotiating the work.
AI may turn a suggestion or discussion into a false commitment. Treat extracted work as a draft until a person with context confirms it.
SOURCES
What the sources cover.
Practitioner-created method
Official GTD materials define the five stages and the complete practitioner method. Independent research on unfinished goals, specific planning, external reminders, and time management provides context for parts of the approach rather than an evaluation of the complete branded system.
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WHERE IT FITS