Getting Things Done: the GTD method explained in 5 steps
When you’re ready to sit down to work, click on Today in the left-hand navigation menu to see any tasks that you must complete today. Open Upcoming to see what’s coming down the pipeline this week and any week in the future. For GTD to work, you must stop storing information in your brain. Anything that crosses your mind — to-dos, events, ideas, book recommendations, etc. — must be captured and stored immediately in an inbox. In GTD, an inbox, be it physical or digital, is a visual representation of all the inputs you need to somehow deal with on a daily basis.
To learn more about Getting Things Done and how you can implement the GTD methodology with Wrike, sign up for a free trial and get started today. Although the GTD workflow is applied at an individual level, you can also implement this methodology within a team. When implementing the GTD system, start by collecting all pending tasks in one list with no regard for their urgency or importance. After listing your commitments, recognize and gather your “open loops”— anything that needs to be done. ABC analysis identifies which goods or customers generate the most revenue.
Calendar blocking: an essential guide to mastering your time
If you’re in the car and you’re 15 minutes away from your destination, you shouldn’t start a phone call that you know will take an hour of your time. A better choice might be to stop at the supermarket to cross some things off your shopping list. If you can complete a task in two minutes or less, do it right away and don’t add it to the Getting Things Done system.
Current projects have at least one next action, waiting for, or calendar action, in order to be considered current. This final step in the GTD process launches you into getting to work, with the knowledge that you’re working on the right tasks in the right order and that less urgent tasks are not being overlooked. Viewing tasks by their due dates can be helpful at this stage.
Tools
Everything should have been moved to the appropriate project or working doc so that the next time you check your Inbox, you’re triaging brand new tasks. The best way to capture all of this stuff is to use a virtual system—not an analogue one. Written to-do lists provide the wonderfully what is gtd satisfying feeling of crossing something off, but they’re also the worst way to keep track of your to-dos. In reality, a written to-do list is often disorganized, prone to mistakes, easy to lose, and ineffective. Don’t worry if the work you capture isn’t organized or well documented.
Using a GTD system template to list the project ideas removes them from your mind and provides the reassurance that nothing is going to slip through the cracks. No matter whether it’s a business or private context, hardly any plans succeed with that approach. The WOOP method combines proven techniques for achieving goals and establishing new habits. Rather than simply ignoring potential obstacles, the WOOP strategy explicitly accounts for them in its plans.
Core principles of a GTD workflow — what makes it so effective?
The purpose of all this management and workflow is to facilitate the decision of what you should be doing at any time. Every so often you should review the big picture; clarifying your long-term goals and visions and principles that ultimately determine how you make your decisions. What I need most in a task manager app is trust; that when I send a task to the inbox or move things around, nothing’s going to be lost. I use Nirvana to organize fundraising events and it is my rock. Our users trust Nirvana to manage all sorts of short- and long-term goals. For more support on managing projects, check out the Anatomy of Projects webinar on GTD Connect.
However, the GTD method is usually excessive if you’re only involved in a relatively small number of projects and don’t have too many different personal and professional responsibilities. The fundamental idea of the GTD method is to put down all your tasks in writing to ensure that you won’t forget anything. In the long run, you’ll be less stressed because you won’t have to remember everything. And since you won’t have to constantly recall important tasks, your mind will be less fixated on planned tasks at inconvenient times of the day. In other words, you’ll lose less sleep worrying about what you need to get done. Thanks to a written organizational system, you can rest assured that you’ll get everything done on time and won’t forget anything.
Getting things done with Wrike in 5 easy steps
You could cross a few phone calls off your list, write a report, or continue working on an idea for a workshop. Since the workshop will be held in three days and you haven’t prepared yet, you choose this task. The report, on the other hand, is a routine report, and the phone calls can wait a few days.
Float is another tool that can help plan projects by syncing tasks and items from Asana or Trello into project lists and synchronizing activities on your calendar with your Float schedule. Each week, set aside time to review your lists, organize your tasks, and keep your system running smoothly. The review helps you adapt to changes, refocus your attention, identify next actions, and reflect on your workflow.
View Next Actions and Contexts via labels
Attach task-specific reference materials to task comments. To keep things simple, finish setting up your GTD system first to get a sense of your workflow. If needed, come back and organize your projects into broader categories later. These are tasks that take longer than 2 minutes but only require one step. For example, “reply to Josh’s email about project pricing” or “renew car tabs.” You don’t want them cluttering up your inbox, but they also don’t belong in any other project.
- Instead, you’ll be able to respond to incoming information calmly and prioritize your time confidently.
- Are you always putting off tasks until the last minute?
- Use it appropriately to organize your plans and prioritize your to-dos to make them manageable so that you can work through them stress-free.
- Regardless of the frequency of review, this is the moment to revise lists as needed.
- The WOOP method combines proven techniques for achieving goals and establishing new habits.
While editing a task, you can click on the Schedule field and select a date and time from the calendar. Or simply type the due date and/or time into the task field using natural language, for example, next Monday at 8am. The smart Quick Add will automatically recognize and highlight the due date and add it when you save the task. You can even type in recurring due dates, like every other Wednesday, for tasks that repeat on a regular basis. Identify the next action for each project by tagging it with the label “@next.” To add a label, simply type “@” into the task field and start typing the task name.
The five steps of the Getting Things Done method set you up for success. These steps help you catalogue and organize your upcoming work in an external tool like Asana, so you’re no longer mentally keeping track of upcoming to-dos. Then, once your work is organized in the GTD method, you can start executing on tasks.
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