What is Getting Things Done?
Getting Things Done (GTD) is a productivity method built on one core idea: your brain is for having ideas, not holding them. Developed by David Allen, GTD provides a systematic process for capturing everything that demands your attention, clarifying what each item means, organizing it into a trusted system, and reviewing that system regularly so you always know what to do next.
GTD works because it externalizes the cognitive load of remembering. When every task, commitment, and idea lives in a system you trust, your mind stops cycling through open loops ("did I respond to that email?", "when is that thing due?") and focuses on the work in front of you. The result is less anxiety, fewer dropped commitments, and a clearer sense of what your actual priorities are.
The method is built around five steps that form a continuous cycle: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. Each step has a specific purpose, and skipping any one of them causes the system to degrade. Most people who try GTD and abandon it fail at step four (reflect) - they build the system but never review it, so it goes stale and they stop trusting it.
The five GTD steps
Step 1: Capture - get it out of your head
Capture means recording every task, idea, commitment, and open loop into a single collection point. The goal is 100% capture - nothing stays in your head. If you think of something, it goes into the inbox immediately. This applies to everything: work tasks, personal errands, ideas for future projects, things you promised someone you would do.
The capture tool does not matter as long as it is always available and frictionless. On a kanban board, the Inbox column serves as the capture point. In Flux, you can create a card in the Inbox column in seconds - type the thought, hit enter, move on. The card does not need a description, labels, or an assignee yet. Capture is about speed, not completeness.
The critical habit is capturing everything without evaluating it. Do not decide whether an idea is good or bad while capturing. Do not judge whether a task is worth doing. Just record it. Evaluation happens in the next step. Mixing capture and clarification slows both processes and leads to ideas being lost because you decided they were not worth writing down.
Step 2: Clarify - decide what it means
Clarify means processing every item in your inbox by asking two questions: "Is this actionable?" and "What is the next physical action?"
If the item is not actionable, it falls into one of three categories: trash (delete it), reference material (file it somewhere searchable), or someday/maybe (a future possibility you want to remember but not commit to now). On a kanban board, trash means archiving the card, reference means moving it to a Reference column or noting it in a document, and someday/maybe means applying a "Someday" label and moving it to the Backlog.
If the item is actionable, define the next concrete step. Not "handle the deployment" but "write the migration script for the user table." If that next action takes less than two minutes, do it immediately - do not put it on the board. The overhead of tracking a two-minute task exceeds the time to just complete it. If it takes longer, it becomes a card with a clear title that describes the next physical action.
Flux's AI assistant can help with the clarify step. Describe a vague item - "deal with the performance issue on the search page" - and the AI generates a structured card with a specific title, description, and checklist of sub-tasks. This transforms an ambiguous inbox item into an actionable card without the mental effort of breaking it down yourself.
Step 3: Organize - put it where it belongs
Organize means placing each clarified item into the right location in your system. In GTD, the primary organizing dimensions are projects (multi-step outcomes), contexts (the tools or locations needed to do the work), and time (items with hard deadlines).
On a kanban board, organization maps naturally:
- Projects as boards or card groups. Each multi-step project can be its own board, or cards within a project can share a project label on a single board. For teams with many active projects, Flux's multi-board view lets you see cards from all project boards in one screen.
- Contexts as labels. GTD contexts like @computer, @phone, @office, @waiting-for translate directly to labels. When you sit down at your computer, filter the board by the @computer label to see only the tasks you can do right now in your current context.
- Time-bound items as due dates. Cards with hard deadlines get a due date. Cards tied to a specific day (like "call the client on Wednesday") get both a due date and a start date so they appear at the right time.
- Waiting-for as a column or label. Tasks that are blocked on someone else (you delegated them or are waiting for a response) go into a Waiting For column or get a @waiting-for label. Review these weekly to follow up on anything that has gone silent.
Step 4: Reflect - the weekly review
The weekly review is the most important habit in GTD. It is what keeps the system alive. Without it, your board becomes a graveyard of stale cards that you stop trusting, and you revert to keeping things in your head.
The weekly review has three parts:
- Empty the Inbox. Process every card in the Inbox column by clarifying it (Step 2). No card should remain in Inbox after the review. If you cannot clarify an item, archive it - it is not actionable yet and you can always recreate it later.
- Scan active cards. Go through every card in To Do, In Progress, and Waiting For. Is the card still relevant? Is the next action still correct? Has the context changed? Update, reassign, or archive as needed.
- Review Someday/Maybe. Scan the Backlog for items labeled Someday. Has anything become actionable? Move it to To Do. Has anything become irrelevant? Archive it. This prevents the Backlog from becoming an ever-growing list that you never look at.
Flux's activity log makes the weekly review faster. Instead of trying to remember what happened during the week, scan the log - every card creation, move, comment, and completion is timestamped and attributed. The log is your objective record of what the team accomplished and what changed, which makes the review factual rather than relying on memory.
Step 5: Engage - do the work
Engage means choosing what to work on right now based on four criteria: context (what tools and location do you have?), time available (do you have 15 minutes or 3 hours?), energy level (are you sharp or fatigued?), and priority (among the tasks that match the first three criteria, which one has the highest payoff?).
On a kanban board, engaging means pulling a card from To Do into In Progress and starting work. The board's filters help you apply the first criterion - filter by context label to see only the tasks you can do right now. The card's title (which should describe a concrete next action) tells you exactly what to do. When you finish, move the card to Review or Done and pull the next one.
Setting up a GTD board in Flux
Here is a concrete board setup that maps GTD to kanban:
- Columns: Inbox, Next Actions, In Progress, Waiting For, Done
- Labels (contexts): @computer, @phone, @office, @errand, @agenda (things to discuss with someone)
- Labels (priority): High, Normal, Low
- Labels (type): Someday, Reference, Project
The Inbox column has no WIP limit - it is the unrestricted capture zone. Next Actions has a soft limit to keep the list manageable (10 to 15 cards). In Progress has a hard WIP limit of one to three, depending on whether you are practicing GTD individually or as a team. Waiting For has no limit but gets reviewed weekly.
GTD for teams, not just individuals
GTD was designed for individual productivity, but it adapts well to teams when each team member's Next Actions live on a shared board. The weekly review becomes a team ritual - 30 minutes where everyone processes their Inbox, updates card statuses, and identifies blocked items. The shared board makes it visible when someone has too many cards in In Progress or too many items in Waiting For.
The main adaptation for teams is shared context labels. Instead of personal contexts (@my-computer), use role-based contexts (@frontend, @backend, @design) so the team can filter by who can do the work, not just where they are. Assignees handle personal ownership; context labels handle capability-based routing.
For teams combining GTD with dedicated focus periods, the time blocking guide covers how to protect deep work sessions while maintaining the GTD capture-and-review rhythm. And for the broader task management landscape, the pillar guide shows how GTD fits alongside other methods.
Common GTD mistakes and how to avoid them
Skipping the weekly review
This is the number one reason GTD fails. The system only works if you trust it, and you only trust it if it is current. Schedule the review as a recurring calendar event that you treat as non-negotiable. If you skip it once, the backlog starts to feel untrustworthy. Skip it twice, and you stop looking at the board entirely.
Making the Inbox a To Do list
The Inbox is for raw capture, not organized tasks. If you start pulling work directly from the Inbox without clarifying it first, you lose the distinction between "things I thought of" and "things I have committed to doing." Always process the Inbox into Next Actions or another column before engaging with the work.
Vague next actions
"Handle the deployment" is not a next action. "Write the database migration script for the user table rename" is. Vague cards create resistance - you look at them and feel uncertain about how to start, so you skip them. Specific cards are invitations to act. The extra 30 seconds spent writing a clear title during clarification saves minutes of hesitation later.
Too many contexts
Start with three to five context labels. More than that and the overhead of labeling every card exceeds the benefit of filtering. If you find yourself ignoring context labels because there are too many, consolidate. The labels are useful only if you actually filter by them.