Getting Things Done (GTD) is a time management method, described in the book of the same title by productivity consultant David Allen.

The GTD method rests on the idea of moving planned tasks and projects out of the mind by recording them externally and then breaking them into actionable work items. This allows attention to be focused on taking action on tasks, instead of recalling them.

First published in 2001, a revised edition of the book was released in 2015 to reflect the changes in information technology during the preceding decade.

GTD is based on storing, tracking, and retrieving the information related to the things that need to get done. The mental blocks we encounter are caused by insufficient 'front-end' planning. This means thinking in advance, generating a series of actions that can later be undertaken without further planning. The mind's "reminder system" is inefficient and seldom reminds us of what we need to do at the time and place when we can do it. Consequently, the "next actions" stored by context in the "trusted system" act as an external support which ensures that we are presented with the right reminders at the right time. As GTD relies on external reminders, it can be seen as an application of the theories of distributed cognition or the extended mind.

Workflow

The GTD workflow consists of five stages: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. (The first edition used the names collect, process, organize, plan, and do; the descriptions of the stages are similar in both editions). Once all the material ("stuff") is captured (or collected) in the inbox, each item is clarified and organized by asking and answering questions about each item in turn as shown in the black boxes in the logic tree diagram. As a result, items end up in one of the eight oval endpoints in the diagram: