GTD on the iPhone, set up properly

What GTD is, in five sentences

GTD — Getting Things Done, by David Allen — starts from a simple observation: your head is excellent at having ideas and terrible at storing them. Every commitment you try to remember burns attention in the background, even when you aren’t thinking about it.

The method is about getting all of it out of your head and into a system you can genuinely trust. “Genuinely” is the load-bearing word: if you suspect the system has holes, your head keeps a backup running and you have gained nothing.

In exchange for that trust, the method asks for a specific discipline. Not a lot of it, but consistent.

The five steps

Capture. Everything on your mind goes to one place, without deciding where it belongs. The only metric that matters here is speed: if capturing takes more than a couple of seconds, you will stop doing it and the system starts lying to you.

Clarify. Each item gets a decision. Is it an action? Can it be delegated? Does it belong to a project? Does it take under two minutes? Anything not actionable leaves. This is the step that turns a list of anxieties into a list of actions.

Organise. Everything to its place: projects, contexts, someday, waiting-for, calendar. It isn’t bureaucracy — it’s what lets you later ask “what can I do right now?” and get a short answer.

Reflect. The weekly review. You go over everything, close what’s closed, resurrect what got buried, and start trusting the list again. This is the heart of the method.

Engage. Pick the next action based on where you are, how much time you have and how much energy is left.

Step four is the one everyone drops

Capturing is easy and even enjoyable. Organising has a tidying-up satisfaction to it. Doing is what you were doing anyway.

The weekly review, though, offers no immediate reward, happens on a specific day, and can be postponed with no visible consequence. So it slips. And once it slips, the list stops being trustworthy within two or three weeks: tasks from finished projects, things you already did, things that stopped mattering. The moment you open the list and the first thing you see is noise, you stop opening it.

That isn’t a human failing, it’s a design failing in most systems: the review is left as a voluntary ritual instead of living inside the tool. An app that knows how many days since your last review and puts it in front of you in five minutes solves more than most of the features that get advertised on the front page.

Running it with what’s already on your iPhone

You can start today without installing anything. Apple’s Reminders and Calendar together go further than they get credit for.

1. One list called Inbox, and nothing else. It’s the mailbox. Everything lands there.
2. Voice capture: “Hey Siri, remind me to call the insurer.” It goes to the Inbox if you set it as your default list. This is the step that lets the system survive real life.
3. Lists for contexts, not for areas: @home, @computer, @calls, @errands. A context answers “what can I do from here?”, which is the useful question.
4. A “Someday” list for things you won’t do this month but don’t want to lose.
5. Only things with a time go in the calendar. This is the rule most people break and the one that does the most damage: a calendar full of fake tasks stops telling you when you’re actually busy.
6. A recurring Friday reminder that says “weekly review” and takes half an hour of actual calendar space. If it has no slot, it doesn’t happen.

This setup holds up for months, costs nothing and depends on nobody.

Where that setup starts to hurt

Eventually three specific things begin to ache.

The review is entirely manual. Nothing tells you which projects haven’t moved in three weeks, which tasks lost their context, or what you forgot. The review grows from thirty minutes to ninety, and then it gets dropped.

There are no perspectives based on available time. You can’t ask “what can I do in twenty minutes, at home, on low energy” — which is precisely the question step five is about.

The calendar still lives in another app. You’re back to deciding what fits in the day without seeing the whole day, which is the problem covered in the calendar and tasks guide.

What to demand from a GTD app

If the time comes to switch, these are the questions that separate a task app from a GTD app. They apply to any of them, ours included.

• Does capture take under two seconds with the app closed?
• Is there a real clarify step, or is the inbox just another list?
• Does it distinguish projects from areas from contexts, or is everything a “tag”?
• Does it notice when you’ve gone too long without reviewing, and guide you through it?
• Can you ask “what can I do now, here, with the time I’ve got”?
• Where does your data live, and what happens to it if you stop paying?

An app that fails the fourth and fifth questions is a task list wearing GTD vocabulary. Which may be perfectly good — but it isn’t the same thing.

How Olena does it

Olena implements the five steps as steps, not as folders with nice names.

The inbox has smart capture: as you type it picks up the date, the context with @ and the project with #, so capturing a whole item costs one sentence. Clarify is its own screen — project, contexts, dates, estimated duration — that you pass through once and never hear from again.

The review speaks up when seven days have gone by and puts what changed in front of you, instead of leaving you alone with the full list. And the perspectives answer step five’s question: next actions, someday, waiting, without context, and forgotten.

What you won’t find is the sermon. You don’t need to know GTD to use Olena; if you do know it, you’ll recognise all of it.