Cleared to Create

Over the past three months, we've covered capturing, clarifying, and projects. You now have a trusted system full of clearly defined next actions tied to meaningful outcomes. But when you sit down to work, how do you decide what to do right now? GTD has an elegant answer: context, energy, time, and priority. Contexts: Where You Are and What You Have A context is the tool, location, or situation required to complete an action. Common contexts include @computer, @phone, @errand

In the last two posts, we covered capturing and clarifying — getting things out of your head and deciding what to do about them. If you've been practicing, you've probably noticed that many items in your inbox aren't single actions at all. They're projects. And managing projects well is where GTD transforms from a productivity hack into a life operating system. What Counts as a Project? In GTD, a project is any outcome that requires more than one action step to complete. That

Last month we talked about capturing — getting everything out of your head and into your inbox. If you followed along, you probably have an inbox full of stuff. Now comes the part where GTD really starts to work: clarifying. What Is Clarifying? Clarifying is the process of looking at each item in your inbox and deciding what it means and what you're going to do about it. It's the thinking you do upfront so you don't have to re-think every time you see that item again. Most pe