Operations and constraints
Getting Things Done
A system for stress-free productivity: capture everything outside your head and decide the next action.
Key concepts
- Capture every open loop in a trusted system
- Clarify: what is it, is it actionable, what is the next action
- Two-minute rule: if it takes less than two minutes, do it now
- Organise by context, then do a weekly review
How I use it
For me this book is one word: capture. If you can’t decide something in the moment, make sure it lands somewhere you trust. A conversation with the team, an idea, something I see on the street: I capture it, turn it into a list, and work out the action plan afterwards. Then I go back and exhaust the list one item at a time.
I tried to run the full system and didn’t keep all of it. What stuck was combining it with a bullet journal: my phone for photos and audio, a notebook for notes, and a regular moment to transfer everything and write it up clean. Transcription has made the capture side far easier than when I first read it.