What is GTD (Getting Things Done)?
By: David De Céspedes
Tags: Systems Thinking, Productivity, Life Hacking, Notion, Gtd

Ground: Actions

In short, Actions are work at the what lead to the completion of Projects, which lead you closer to achieving longer-term goals. In terms of scale, Actions are the smallest units; writing an outline for a blog post, summarizing an article, compiling research for a YouTube video. Actions also allow you to focus in on one piece of a project at a time, as well as map out the entirety of a project, by outlining what actions need to be completed.

In GTD, there are two types of Actions:

Time-Based: Actions that need to be done by a certain date/time

Actions that need to be done by a certain date/time Next Actions: Actions that are next up or highest priority for a given project

When planning a project and setting up Actions, it’s important to make this distinction. To be on the safe side, only give actions a date/time if there is a clear external deadline (or if you work better with giving yourself deadlines). This allows you to regularly refresh projects by selecting which Actions are up next, or highest priority.

Note: Not Everything Needs to be an Action

It’s easy to become overzealous — especially at the planning stage — to over-engineer your Actions list. Be careful. This can quickly become overwhelming and dissuade you from using the system, or leading you to abandon it altogether.

GTD offers a useful framework for identifying types of actions. Before formalizing an Action, consider this: can you?

Do It: if it takes less than two minutes, don’t bother logging the Action, just do it.

if it takes less than two minutes, don’t bother logging the Action, just do it. Delegate it: Can someone else take on this Action? Is it someone else’s responsibility?

Can someone else take on this Action? Is it someone else’s responsibility? Defer It: If it’s not critical to your objectives, consider lowering the Action’s priority

The Four-Criteria Model

This may fall into the over-engineering camp, but worth considering if you’re managing multiple projects simultaneously.

When giving attributes to Actions, add the following information:

Context: when and where can I complete this action?

when and where can I complete this action? Time: how much time is required? The Pomodoro technique could work well here

how much time is required? The Pomodoro technique could work well here Energy: How challenging is the action?

How challenging is the action? Priority: What absolutely needs to get done, as soon as possible?

In your workspace, these criteria can easily be added using Properties, creating tags for each level.

Process Control

The more common idea of checklists, however, refers to a listing of the contents of a topic, procedure, or some arena of interest or activity, to be utilized either at a specific time or whenever you engage in a particular kind of activity. — David Allen

A game-changing tactic that lends itself well to productivity tools is creating templates for specific actions – a version of ‘process-control.’ Whether you’re a teacher, entrepreneur, or content-creator, it’s likely that there are certain actions that follow the same rhythm, the same flow. By creating an action template, you’re pre-configuring a page with content to spur action; it could be checklists of mini-actions, guiding prompts, or statements to get you into the ideal mindset for that action.

Time-Based Tools for Actions

There are two Notion-based tools to help manage progress across Actions: