What is GTD*?

GTD is short for "Getting Things Done*". It's a system for personal productivity created by David Allen. Here's a more formal definition.

Here, you can learn about GTD, and how to do it using Note Studio.

Important:
Now, there are many different ways to do GTD, and Note Studio is only one of them. Unless his official website says otherwise, David Allen does not endorse Note Studio, and we have no connection with his company.

In fact, we designed Note Studio long before we heard about GTD. It's only after our users kept telling us how they loved Note Studio for GTD, that we thought we'd better investigate what GTD actually was. Now, we're converted!

If you're interested in GTD, why don't you check out David Allen's website. We highly recommend both the GTD book and the audio book.

* GTD® and Getting Things Done® are registered trademarks of Davidco

Note Studio GTD Refresher

10. Having a Good Capture Tool

One of the biggest reason our heads are busy, and one of the biggest reason we forget things, is because we are not using a good capture tool.

A capture tool is what we use to record our thoughts, wherever we are, as they occur.

I'm not talking about all your thoughts here, like "I wonder what's on TV tonight". I'm talking about your GTD-related thoughts. I'm talking about those brainwaves you have when you're in the car, walking through the shops, or out at lunch.

You see, as we discussed earlier, your brain is not very good at reminding you things at exactly the right time. If you're in the middle of your lunchtime training session at the gym, and your brain reminds you "don't forget - you need to send that email to your bank manager", it's something you can't do right now. But you can't just say to your brain: "great, thanks, just remind me when I'm back at my computer."

Your brain doesn't work that way.

It will remind you 20 more times when you're not at the computer. Continually thinking about items that you can't do anything about is something that adds stress to your day.

Worse, it will completely forget to remind you, when you're actually back at your computer. Instead it will remind you again when you're driving home from work.

What you need is a capture tool. This is like an inbox that you always have with you. You just drop items in when they occur to you. Then later, when you get the chance, you process that inbox, turning those items into actions for your lists.

Once your brain is happy that you've captured the thought in your personal system, it can relax. You can relax.

So, you need a way of capturing these items when and where they occur to you. Your choice of system depends on your personal tastes. It just needs to be two things:

mobile
fast

GTD doesn't specify what tools you should actually use. It could be a paper notepad that's always in your pocket. It could be a pocket computer. It's probably not going to be something like a notebook computer. Even if it only takes 20 seconds to pull out your notebook computer and fire it up, that's too slow. It needs to be something you can have ready to go in less than 5 seconds.

Why?

Because otherwise you're not going to do it. You're going to think "ok, I'll write that down later, when I have a spare moment." But the WHOLE REASON we have a capture tool so we don't have to remember things!"

So a capture tool needs to be something you can take anywhere, and get things into quickly.

OK, enough about what a capture tool should be. What about at the other end, how do you use it? Well, the capture tool can become just another inbox. Later, when you're back at your office, or home, you can go through the items you captured, and process them, just like any other inbox item. This is how the items you capture end up actually getting into your system.

Naturally, this means that you've got to go through your capture tool whenever you get the chance, probably every day. Otherwise, items just sit there, your brain stops trusting your system, and starts reminding you about stuff at 3am.

Note Studio as a Capture Tool

As well as storing your fully-defined projects and next actions, Note Studio can be used as a capture tool. This is a page, or pages, where you just note down things, as quickly as possible, when they occur to you. You may not have time to fully do the thinking about next actions, or defining a project. But at least you have it on a list, which I'll call your Note Studio inbox, for later reference.

This unprocessed items simply sit in your Note Studio inbox, until you have the space to process them. Once you have a chance, you can go through these items, identify projects and next actions, and remove the items from your inbox.

Note Studio is perfect for me, because of how I work day-to-day. I spend a lot of the day at my computer, where I use the desktop version of Note Studio. I just keep it open in the background, and switch to it whenever I need it.

When I leave my desktop, I synch with my Palm Pilot, which also runs Note Studio. Then I have all my GTD system (plus all reference information) with me as I travel around. I can do GTD anywhere on my Palm Pilot, then when I return to my computer, I just synch again, and it updates my PC with the latest information. I find the combination of Palm Pilot and PC works very well for me as a capture tool.

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