My Experience with Getting Things Done (GTD)

I spent some time trying to implement David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. The core premise makes sense: get every task, project, and random idea out of your head and into an external system so you can stop stressing about forgetting them.

After running with it for a while, here is how it actually played out for me.

Things I liked:

• It forces focus. When everything is written down in an inbox, the mental fog lifts. I stopped worrying about forgetting things, which let me actually focus on doing them.
• It gives you permission to ignore ideas. If I have a random idea for a side project, I can just write it down in GTD and move on. I don't have to evaluate it immediately. It gets it out of my brain.

Where GTD broke down for me:

• Out of sight, out of mind. If my GTD dashboard isn't physically open on my screen, I ignore it. It requires active maintenance.
• Inbox inflation. The system encourages you to capture everything. If you aren't ruthless during the review phase, your system quickly turns into a massive, guilt-inducing backlog of 500 tasks you are never going to do. The sheer volume makes it impossible to prioritize.

GTD is great for clearing your head, but the maintenance overhead is real. If you want to try my setup, I built a GTD template in Notion that attempts to streamline the friction.