November 14, 2025

Reader question re: How closely do you follow GTD?

Fellow list member and permanent resident of Ditcherville Clemens Adolphs replied to my recent message about how I process my email inbox to ask the following question (shared with permission):

While we’re in the nitty gritty, and you mentioned GTD, how closely follow you the tactical pieces, like using contexts (@home @computer @errand etc?), and do you create a project for anything that requires more than one action? And how do you make sure certain long-term initiatives get the time they deserve, like if you were writing another book, preparing a course, or something like that?

It’s been so long since I read GTD that it’s hard to remember what’s even in it.

I adopted a bunch of things immediately that stuck with me, but I’m sure there were things that Allen recommended that didn’t work for me and I completely forgot about.

Contexts

Contexts is one of the things that didn’t work for me. I totally forgot about contexts until receiving this question.

Now that we’re talking about it, I do recall experimenting with it, but it wasn’t useful enough to me for the additional cognitive organizational overload of tagging tasks with a context.

Thinking about it even more now, the idea of adding execution contexts to my tasks is backwards from the way I use my list.

In the GTD world, you might categorize “pick up milk” as “grocery store” so when you’re not at the grocery store, you wouldn’t see the task, and when you were at the grocery store you would.

But this is the reverse of how I use my todo list. Ifim at home in the morning and I see on my Today list that I need to pick up milk, then I decide to go to the grocery store.

The idea that I might just happen to be at the grocery store and therefore check my list for “grocery store” items makes no sense to me.

Furthermore, I don’t need to be at the grocery store to get milk. I could walk to the convenience store or schedule a delivery from Doordash or (in a pinch) ask my neighbors for a half gallon or whatever else.

In other words, what context would I even apply to a task like “pick up milk”? I’m not sure, and I certainly don’t want to have to spend a drop of creative energy wondering about it and the deciding (and then later remembering that I even have a “grocery store” context or whatever.

All I care about is that I have to pick up milk. If I know I can’t do it today, I’ll postpone it to tomorrow, thereby adhering to my “if I can’t do something about it, I don’t want to see it” principle.

In my system, the task dictates the context, not the other way around.

Projects

CA’s next question was about projects, which IIRC, GTD defines as anything requiring more than one step.

I keep all kinds of notes and documentation and lists and checklists and SOPs that would be related to something like a project or a client engagement.

But I don’t keep any of this stuff in my to-do list. It’s supporting documentation, not a list of actions I need to do right now. For any given project, I’ll just have maybe one or two “next step” tasks in my Today list.

And if I’m not sure what the next action for a project is, I’ll put “Figure out next step for project_name” in my Today list.

(And if I find that I keep snoozing it for like a week, I’ll remove the date and move it to my Someday list because I’m obviously not going to do it right now.)

Long-Term Initiatives

For long-term initiatives like writing a book, I’ll create a daily recurring task like “Write 500 words for book_title” with a direct link to the document where I’m drafting the manuscript.

I’ll give you a real life example...

Since August, I have been in candidate training for my 3rd degree black belt test. The test has several components, including written essays, an oral exam, performance of 15 forms and almost 200 defenses, board breaking, general physical fitness challenges, etc.

It’s a ton of material - not the kind of thing you can cram for ;-)

There are several things I need to do every day for months to be ready, so I added them as daily tasks to my todo app, for example:

Writing a book or creating a course or migrating from Slack to Circle would be exactly like this.

Decide what needs to get done next, and add that and only that to your Today list.

If there are other tasks that you think you’ll probably have to do in the future, put them in your project notes and check there when you’re all out of active todo’s for the project in question.

Any questions on anything here? Just hit reply and ask!

Yours,

—J

BackRandomNext