GTD Fundamentals<\/a>, you learn how to conceptually break down your workflow into five fundamental steps \u2013 capture, clarify, organise, reflect and engage. Understanding and implementing the best practices around each of these can bring much greater stability to your workflow. Seeing the GTD Clarifying process as a standalone activity in its own right can be particularly helpful, transforming a feeling of being relentlessly distracted by every ping, ding and ring into a much greater feeling of control and agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSecondly, GTD gives you a trusted system outside of your head that acts as a line of defence between you and the pressure of your commitments. It doesn\u2019t make them go away but it does take on the job of doing the reminding. Without any way of doing this, there nothing between you and having the world nag you constantly about what it wants, and this is a pretty tiring and unrewarding way to live. When people talk about not being able to switch off, this is why. With a trusted system, however, your brain is freed up from taking those hits and free to think about what you want to think about, for as long as you want to think about it or think about nothing at all. You don\u2019t need to be deep under the ground to achieve this kind of calm if you have a system and a process that regulates how you manage your attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thirdly, having a GTD system enables you to see only what you need to see when it\u2019s time to choose what to do. Knowing that you don\u2019t need to constantly see everything that you could potentially do in the foreseeable future usually feels like a great weight being lifted from the shoulders of new GTDers. Only seeing the things it\u2019s useful to see in a given moment creates clarity and confidence about how your time is being used, and the satisfaction that you\u2019re doing the right things. And when it comes to clocking off time \u2013 whatever the commute looks like – knowing that everything will still be there in your GTD system tomorrow creates the quiet space that you enter each night because you can then easily disengage from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I find it\u2019s helpful to think of GTD in terms of the boundaries it creates and maintains for you. Boundaries can be physical, like the door you lock behind you each night, or they can be temporal, like the quiet space many people love in the early mornings before the world wakes up. Both of these can be eroded, however, if you don\u2019t have solid mental<\/em> boundaries and this is where GTD helps. It gives you quiet, protected headspace<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo, don\u2019t let your life keep hitting you like a runaway train. If you\u2019ve not yet started using GTD, just know that there\u2019s another way to work and live. If you have started using it, then you\u2019ll probably already know that there\u2019s light at the end of the tunnel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in the day I was a commuter. On the face of it the trip was a daily grind; from Manchester to Sheffield and back again by train over The Pennines – the \u2018backbone\u2019 of England – but in actual fact I loved it because it gave me a protected bubble of peace and quiet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":144813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_eb_attr":"","gtp_columnspro_styling":"{}","gtp_paragraph_styling":"{}","gtp_heading_styling":"{}","gtp_spacer_styling":"{}","gtp_video_styling":"{}","gtp_group_styling":"{}","gtp_cover_styling":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[323,312,318],"tags":[62,79,162,127],"yst_prominent_words":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144812"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144812"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=144812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}