Getting Things Done

David Allen spent years as a productivity consultant and executive trainer before gathering the whole method into a book published in 2001. He wasn't writing for stay-at-home parents or students. He was writing for American executives drowning in meetings, emails and simultaneous projects, trying not to let anything fall through the cracks.

The book became so influential that the method itself got a short nickname, still used today at tech companies and startups: the acronym GTD, formed from the initials of the original English title, became shorthand for any structured system of organizing tasks.

It's worth understanding the method without assuming it's the only right way to get organized. It was born in a world of offices, paper, physical planners and answering machines, and it has reached today adapted for phone apps, which already changes quite a bit how it works in practice.

The book's starting idea is that the human brain is great at thinking and terrible at remembering everything on its own. When you try to hold fifty open items in memory, your brain spends energy reminding you of them all the time, even when you're trying to do something completely different.

That explains the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night remembering you forgot to pay a bill, or losing the thread of an important conversation because part of your mind is busy trying not to forget to buy a birthday present.

The book calls this noise an open loop, and argues that it drains mental energy even when it seems you're not thinking about the task, because part of your mind stays on guard, afraid of forgetting.

This energy drain happens even with small tasks. Remembering to buy new batteries or renew a subscription takes up the same kind of mental space as remembering a big commitment, just at lower intensity, and the sum of them weighs more than it seems.

Allen uses the image of still water to describe the mental state the method tries to reach: not stirred up by too many open items, not frozen by fear of forgetting something important, just clear enough to respond well to whatever comes up at the right moment.

To get to that state, the proposal isn't to remember everything with more willpower. It's to take everything out of your head and put it into a system outside it, reliable enough that you stop policing your own memory all the time.

This changes a lot about the day of someone who is constantly checking mentally whether they forgot something. With a reliable external system, the answer to that question is already written down somewhere, so your mind can rest from that constant vigil.