The Getting Things Done (GTD) method was developed by David Allen and published in his 2001 book "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity". I first found David's book in about 2004 when I was managing my growing web development consultancy and was sold on the title, as at the time, removing a bit of stress from my day-to-day sounded like a great thing.
As it turned out, it was truly transformative to my daily workflow (and yes, it does remove stress), and we also incorporated elements of it into our team workflow. This was the first step in my 20 year (and counting) journey with refining my personal and team productivity. It's still about reducing stress and cognitive load, but also about delivering effectively to the goals we set.
For anyone starting a personal productivity journey I recommend starting with GTD. Here are the key steps in the GTD method and how they helped me. If you want to know all of our productivity hacks, head over to our Products page for a free download of our 16 top hacks.
For me, this had the biggest initial impact. Prior to starting with the GTD Method, I was trying to keep so many ideas, tasks, projects, etc. in my head. The cognitive load of remembering my day-to-day was immense and left very little brain power for deep thinking.
GTD tells us to collect anything that has your attention. Just write it down, whatever "it" is, and get it out of your head. For me, this was a notebook at first (hello, nascent bullet journal), and over time I have developed a paperless method (ToDoist and Evernote if you're interested). Once you form this habit, your brain will stop worrying about trying to recall information, and will devote its attention to the thinking required for the task at hand.
Once you have captured the things that were in your head, the next step is to clarify what they mean. Is it actionable? If not, discard it, file it as reference, or put it on a list of things you'd like to do someday. If it is actionable, make the action specific (start it with a verb) and consider if it is part of a larger piece of work or project.
This part was hard for me in my journey. When I had ideas and information that I thought were VERY IMPORTANT but weren't actionable, it was quite hard to file them away (or even harder to discard). I persisted, though, and the benefits became very clear as I continued. The things that actually are very important will still come to the surface, and those that don't turned out to be great information that helped later at best or passing whims at worst.
After clarifying, you should have a list of actionable tasks, and the next step is to organise them by category and priority and assign them to the appropriate to-do list (such as projects, next actions, or someday/maybe). The Eisenhower Matrix is a great way to prioritise actions as it quickly and easily lets you bubble up those things that need to happen next.
Organising also involves using calendars, task lists, and project files to keep track of commitments, responsibilities, and actions. I was paper-based for task lists and project work at first, but these days I use ToDoist for task lists, Trello for project-like work, and Google Calendar. There are a lot of other great apps out there, and arguably better ones, but these are the ones that suit me best.
This is where the rubber hits the road. Simply "do". Once your tasks and projects are organised and prioritised, you can choose your next action based on context, priority, time available, and energy levels. Some other hacks that I find very useful here are Time Blocking and Batching. Basically, grouping like things together and blocking out time to get them done.
The other key thing in my journey was from a team perspective. We were a remote team (before it was cool), and maintaining visibility of who was doing what and where it was at was the critical thing that supercharged our productivity as a team. The Kanban Method was key for us with maintaining this visibility. We used Jira for this (yes, it was available in the early 2000's) at first, but found it to be too heavyweight for our needs. We switched to Basecamp a while after. These days, Trello suits our needs at Sora Strategies perfectly.
Decide a cadence and regularly review and update your lists. I use daily for granular tasks, weekly for project related work, and monthly for more strategic things (as well as a review of those things that didn't make it to an action list).
The other key thing for me, as you may have gathered, is adjusting this process over time to best suit me. I have incorporated other tools and techniques to augment the GTD Method, and even changed some key elements of it to better suit my needs. I am constantly running experiments on my personal workflow (current one is using Obsidian for capture - watch this space for a review).
When continuously improving your team or personal productivity, it's critical to use metrics, so you can actually measure whether you're becoming more productive (I use throughput for this at a personal and team level). It's also critical to have a metric for if you're delivering more valuable stuff. This can vary, but I align these metrics to whatever strategic (or project) goal I am pursuing.
Basically, have something in place to measure both efficiency and effectiveness.
If you have any questions or would like more info on anything I've mentioned here, please reach out, and good luck on your productivity journey!