Out of all of the personal productivity systems competing for our attention today, perhaps the two most successful are David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) and Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow (DIT). We may know someone who swears by one of these systems, or may have wanted to dip into them ourselves, but GTD and DIT offer vastly different ways to get organised. Comparing them head to head, we can identify the one that fits our workload and personalities better—or even pick the features that appeal the most to create our own customised blend of the two.

The Core of Getting Things Done

GTD is, in many ways, the classic. Since Allen’s book appeared in 2001, it has swept through the world of task management and enjoys a loyal following. GTD’s core concepts revolve around capturing all the actions, ideas, thoughts and pieces of information that bombard us in everyday life. Many of us are under massive stress from physical information cluttering our work-space and unresolved appointments and projects haunting our brain.
GTD seeks to reduce the stress by getting all of that information out of the brain, off of the desk and recording it into a trusted system. When we record all the random “stuff,” it becomes physical. Our minds are released from constant worry, allowing us to concentrate on completing tasks and projects. Once we have a way to process all the information coming to us, we can determine what to do with it—and how to get it all done.

The Principles of GTD

GTD is a system in which you collect, process, organise and review all the information that comes into your life and then do all actions derived from them.

Collect: All incoming information or “stuff” has to be collected in a so-called bucket: an inbox, PDA or anything you prefer. Every scrap of information from a take-out menu to an office memo ends up in the in-box, which is regularly emptied.

Process: How we empty the buckets. Items are taken one at a time and evaluated. If it’s an action, it needs to be done immediately (under two minute action) or delegated to the appropriate persons, or deferred for ourselves. If an item is a non-action, it needs to be thrown away, or appropriately filed.

Organise: Now actions are organised according to their status and dealt with. Actions are either Next Action (there is a next logical step towards completing them), Projects (what Allen calls “open-loops” that take more than one action step to complete), Waiting For (have been delegated and we now wait for results), or Someday/Maybe (any non-actionable data/ideas that you may want to access later)…

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