GTD Was Right About the Mind. It Was Built for 2001.
October 10, 2026
AI, Productivity
I've run David Allen's Getting Things Done long enough that most of it runs in my head now.
His core idea still holds. Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
But a lot of GTD's rules weren't about the mind.
They were about the paper.
Take inboxes. Allen's advice: have as many as you need and as few as you can get by with. Every inbox is a place you have to go and empty, and everything in it has to be copied somewhere else by hand. A notebook. A desktop file. A sticky note. An email you flagged. Each one is a chore waiting to happen.
So I built something that flips that rule.
I call it the Bench. I say a thought into one button on my phone, type it into a chat, forward an email, or drop it in a box on the page. It all lands in one place. Claude files it under the right project and asks me when something's unclear. Every two hours it works whatever I've pressed: drafts, research, first passes. Nothing goes to anyone but me unless I press send.
Inboxes are free now. Have as many as your day needs.
Then came the surprise.
I asked another AI to review the whole system. Its sharpest finding: my system was making chores. Of the 83 cards waiting for my tap, 75 were the system asking me to confirm work I had already done.
I'd automated the clerical work and handed it back to myself as homework.
Ohhh.
So I paused that part. And I learned something about where productivity is going.
GTD fails by neglect. Skip the weekly review for a month and your lists go stale. You stop trusting them.
An AI system fails the other way. By overreach. It does too much, quietly, in places you don't look.
That needs new rules:
- Agents propose. Only you admit.
- Every action leaves a receipt.
- Decisions are yours. The system can read them. It can't change them.
The five steps of GTD still work: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage. What changed is who does each one. You stop processing and start judging. Your lists become views. The context that matters isn't where you are. It's who does the work: you, Claude, or someone else.
I wrote the whole comparison up, step by step, in After GTD. And if you want to see how it's wired, here's the full system map.
Try this. For one week, count the minutes you spend moving words from one place to another. Notebook to list. Email to task. Sticky note to calendar.
That's the tax GTD asked you to pay.
It's optional now.