2024-04-28 · 11 min read

The GTD Setup That Finally Stuck

The GTD Setup That Finally Stuck

I've been a productivity nut for fifteen years. David Allen's Getting Things Done was the first system I latched onto, in college, and since then I've cycled through approximately every tool, framework, and minor cult of personality on the productivity internet: Things, OmniFocus, Todoist, paper Bullet Journals, the Eisenhower matrix, time blocking, theme days, Sunday reviews, Monday reviews, daily reviews, no reviews. Roam, Notion, Obsidian, Google Keep. The big-three post-it. The 1-3-5 list. The most-important-task. Eat the frog. Two pizzas. Deep work blocks. Pomodoros, short ones, long ones, in pairs, in sequence.

You get the picture.

Most of these stuck for a few months. None of them made it to a year. The pattern was always the same: I'd discover the system, set it up over a weekend with great enthusiasm, run it cleanly for six to eight weeks, gradually let the maintenance slide, and finally abandon it when the system itself became more friction than the chaos it was meant to organize.

A few years ago I read a piece by Dan Shipper at Every called "Action Item: How to Become a Machine," profiling a developer named Nate Berkopec and his GTD setup. I copied his system more or less verbatim. That was three years ago and I'm still running it. It's the longest I've ever stuck with anything in this category.

This is a post about why.

Key takeaways

  • The system that sticks is the boring one: about fifteen minutes a day, no reports, no streak counter, no review ritual to maintain.
  • Steal a setup someone you respect already runs. Don't design your own, and don't customize it on day one.
  • One list for work and personal. "What should I do next" is a single question; splitting it doubles the maintenance.
  • Time-box hard work instead of setting outcome goals. Starting is the hard part, and time-boxing makes starting cheap.
  • A good GTD setup is the moat around deep work, not the work itself.

Why I should not be writing this post

Earlier this year I wrote a post arguing that productivity systems are fundamentally counterproductive. That they create the comforting illusion of progress through shallow work, while crowding out the deep work they're ostensibly designed to make space for. I still believe that.

So here's the apparent contradiction: I argued productivity systems are nefarious, and now I'm telling you about my productivity system that I've been running for three years.

The resolution is in the word "nefarious." Productivity systems are dangerous when they become the work. They become the work when they're complicated enough to demand maintenance, novel enough to demand learning, and rewarding enough, through that little dopamine hit of a checked box, to compete with actual creative output for your attention.

The system I'm about to describe is the opposite of all three of those things. It is boring. It takes about fifteen minutes a day to run. It produces no satisfying review ritual. There are no reports. There is no streak counter. The whole point is to clear the trivial stuff out of my head as cheaply as possible so that I can spend the rest of the day on things that aren't trivial.

This is the system that lets me write the deep-work posts, not the system that replaces writing them.

The system

Every weekday morning I open all my inboxes and do this in order:

1. Open everything. Email, calendar, Slack, voice notes, the desktop folder where I dump screenshots and downloads, and a couple of project-specific tabs. One keyboard shortcut, one workspace, one window. The whole point is that this should be cheap enough that I'd rather just do it than think about whether to do it.

2. Triage every inbox to zero. For each item, three options: delete, defer to my one task list, or do it right now if it'll take less than two minutes. That's it. No labels, no folders, no subtags. The goal is not to organize my email; it's to empty it. Once I've decided what an item is, I close the tab and never reopen it.

3. End up with a single list of about ten to fifteen items. Work and personal mixed together. I don't keep separate systems for separate domains. The reason is that "what should I do next" is the same question whether the answer is finish the spec for the Hardware Growth team or book the rental for Casey's birthday. Splitting them creates more places to look, not fewer things to do.

4. Make every item actionable. This is the most important step and the one most people skip. "Birthday rental" is not a task. "Search Airbnb for 4-bedroom places in the Adirondacks for the weekend of June 14, send Casey three options" is a task. The transformation has to happen on the way in, while the context is still fresh, not on the way out when I'm trying to start working and have to figure out what past-me meant.

5. Loosely prioritize. Things that have to happen on a specific day get a date. Everything else gets a P1 / P2 / P3, but I use these very loosely, more as a sorting hint than a strict ranking. A real priority system is overhead. A loose one is a vibe-check.

6. Estimate duration on each item, then schedule the day. Fifteen minutes here, ninety minutes there. I block them onto the calendar. The blocks are aggressive. I usually overestimate the actual workday by about 25%, which is fine, because life happens and unfinished blocks roll forward. The point of the schedule is not to predict the day; it's to give every block a story before the day starts. By 8:30am I know what I'm doing at 11.

That's the whole thing.

Five things that make it work

After three years, I have opinions about why this version works when others didn't.

It's stupid. Not in a self-deprecating way. Literally stupid. There is almost no decision-making in the system itself. I don't pick a tool every morning. I don't sort items by Eisenhower quadrant. I don't review which projects are advancing toward which goals. The system has been pre-decided, three years ago, by someone who isn't me, and I just run the loop. Decision fatigue is real, and the most expensive decision is the meta-decision about how to manage your day. I closed that decision once and have not reopened it.

It costs fifteen minutes. This is the threshold. Below fifteen minutes, the system feels free, cheaper than the cost of not doing it, which is showing up to the day with chaos in your inboxes and no plan. Above fifteen minutes, it starts to compete with the actual work, and the resentment builds, and one day you skip it, and the day after that you skip it again, and that's the end. Whatever system you adopt, time it. Watch the clock. If it ever drifts above twenty, you have to simplify.

Work and personal share one list. I held out for a long time on this. Felt very pro to keep them separate. I was wrong. Cognitively, "what's the next thing I should do" is a single question, and answering it requires looking in one place. Splitting the systems splits your attention and roughly doubles the maintenance cost. The combined list is also a useful forcing function: when you can see the next personal thing sitting next to the next work thing and the personal one is more important, you do the personal one, which is correct, and which a work-only system would never have allowed.

Time-boxing beats outcome-targeting on hard work. This is a Nir Eyal point and I think it's underappreciated. When the task is "write the strategy doc," outcome goals like "finish the strategy doc today" or "write 1,500 words" are demoralizing. They front-load the entire weight of the project onto the next four hours. Time-box it instead. Spend ninety minutes on the strategy doc. That's it. After ninety minutes you can stop. You're allowed to. And because you're allowed to stop, you usually keep going. The hard part of hard work is starting; time-boxing makes starting cheap.

It does not require a special tool. Nate uses Todoist. I use Effortless because the time-blocking UI is good and the friction-cost of scheduling a block is low. But I've also run the same system in Apple Reminders, in a notebook, and on the back of an envelope on a long flight. The system is the system; the tool just has to not get in the way. If you're shopping for the perfect tool, you're shopping. Pick one in under ten minutes and start.

What this system does not do

It's worth being clear about what's missing, because I want you to know what you're getting and what you're not.

It does not handle long-horizon goals. I don't track quarterly OKRs or yearly themes inside this system. Those live somewhere else (mostly in long-form writing, see the Past Year Review habit). The daily list is for the next 24-48 hours. It is bad at five-year arcs and that's fine, because trying to make one tool good at both is what kills systems.

It does not generate energy. A good GTD system reduces the friction of acting on energy you already have. It does not summon energy when you don't have it. If you sit down at 9am with nothing in the tank, no priority system will save you, and trying to make one will mostly waste the first hour of your day. Sleep, exercise, food, time outside: these are upstream of any productivity system, and if they're broken nothing downstream works.

It does not protect you from working on the wrong things. The system makes me very good at executing whatever I put on the list. If I put the wrong thing on the list, it makes me very good at executing the wrong thing. Choosing what to work on is a separate skill (strategy, not execution), and it gets developed differently. (Mostly through writing, in my case, including the writing I do on this blog. The function of writing is figuring out what you actually think.)

The relationship to deep work

Here is the bridge back to the productivity-is-unproductive post.

The reason I can hold both ideas (productivity systems are nefarious and yet I run a productivity system) is that the system I run is designed to do exactly one job: clear the shallow stuff out of the way as fast as possible.

The fifteen-minute morning loop empties my email. It empties my Slack. It captures the small commitments I made yesterday that would otherwise leak out of my head. It schedules them somewhere I will see them at the right time. And then it gets out of the way.

What it leaves behind is the thing that can't be systematized: the multi-hour creative block where I'm trying to figure out what I actually think about something hard. That block is on the calendar, but the calendar didn't make it. The system made space for it. The work itself is in a different category: uncountable and unschedulable, and almost entirely undone by the kind of "productivity" that gets celebrated on the internet.

That's the asymmetry. Shallow work needs systems because shallow work is infinite and will fill any container you give it. Deep work needs the absence of systems because deep work is what you do when there's nothing more urgent demanding your attention.

A good GTD setup is the moat around the deep-work castle. It's not the castle itself.

What to do next, if you're still here

If you've tried six productivity systems and abandoned all of them, the move is not to find the seventh. The move is this:

Checklist: stealing a system that sticks

  1. Pick a setup that someone you respect is already running. Don't design your own. Don't customize. Steal the whole thing.
  2. Time it. If it costs more than fifteen minutes a day on the median day, simplify until it doesn't.
  3. Run it for two weeks before you change anything. Most "this isn't working" feelings are actually "I haven't done it long enough" feelings.
  4. After two weeks, the only changes allowed are subtractions. You can remove pieces. You cannot add pieces.
  5. Notice what the system frees you to do. If the answer is "more shallow work," you have the wrong system. If the answer is "the deep, uncountable, real work," you have the right one.

The whole point is to get to where the system is so cheap and so boring that you stop thinking about it, and you can spend your actual life on the things that actually matter to you.

That's it. Now go do something hard.

References