Tag: “Clarify”

One day in 1927 Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian student of psychology at the University of Berlin, went along with several classmates and teachers to have dinner at a restaurant in town. When the waiter who served them took the order of all the diners with absolutely nothing to write in, as he did with the rest of the tables, she thought it was going to end badly. However, after a while the waiter served everyone exactly what they ordered.

One of the most common mistakes when implementing GTD, not only at the beginning but also after having practiced the method for a long time, is the tendency to mix the stages of collecting and processing (or capturing and clarifying, as David Allen call them in his recent review and update of the GTD book.)

Updated and expanded in May 2024.

Processing is the stage of the GTD workflow in which you make decisions. You get all the stuff you have collected and, one by one, decide what are you going to do with them.

Perfection can kill your intention to implement changes and make things that lead you to a better situation. Many of my blog readers tell me how hard it is to apply GTD for them. They become desperate for not reaching the levels David Allen describe in his book. My answer is always the same: just start to implement it, then refine the details slowly but steadily. Find something you can improve in each stage of the process, small changes that do not involve too much difficulty. If you are able to chain these little improvements, the return obtained will be spectacular. Here are some suggestions to get you started: