What’s GTD®?
GTD® – short for Getting Things Done – is a personal productivity method created and made popular by David Allen in his best-selling book Getting Things Done, the Art of Stress-Free Productivity. First published in 2001, and updated in 2015, the international GTD community is over 2 million strong.
Whether you’re just discovering GTD, or are looking to read it again, I invite you to join my free GTD Book Club and read the book alongside me.
The book is the manual for practicing stress-free productivity, and as you read the book, light-bulb moments and David’s words of advice will ring true.
It’s important to understand that the book is only the first step in a 5 step process for actually practicing effective GTD and achieving the promise of stress-free productivity. Learn more about the book, and its role in accomplishing stress-free productivity in this free article.
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
As David convincingly teaches, to effectively practice stress-free productivity, you must have a trusted system outside your brain. This means:
Trusted: If you don’t trust your system it falls apart. Do you have a system that you trust 100% to capture, retain, process, and retrieve everything you want to remember and tackle every day, over the course of your life?
System: The system is the framework by which you route and manage all the “stuff” that comes at you. David’s book teaches the heuristics and methodology for managing your own GTD system. Even as technology evolves, the GTD system rules remain the same.
Outside your brain: Our brain is forgetful. Our brain gets overwhelmed. Our brain ages. Your trusted system cannot be your brain.
So what exactly should you use as your trusted, outside your brain system? The challenge for most readers: The book is deliberately software-neutral.
GTD practitioner’s are left to find their tool, or suite of tools, to create and manage the GTD framework. There are no shortage of constantly evolving software options to pick from. Most find it overwhelming. And, they give up on GTD because they don’t find the right tool – one that can properly manage the mountain of data flying at us daily.
But there is a solution. One that is flexible enough to support all that David teaches and powerful enough to manage the information overload that is our reality. It’s Evernote.