The GTD app setup that sticks, in five views

TL;DR: A GTD setup that sticks has five views (Inbox, Today, Upcoming, Anytime, Someday), a two-minute daily triage, and a weekly review. Setups usually die of too much structure. You can shape most apps into this version. In Done Bear the five views are the default navigation, so there’s nothing to maintain.

Getting Things Done is twenty-five years old and the core idea still holds: get every commitment out of your head and into a system you trust, so your attention is free for the task in front of you.

The book’s method has five steps: capture, clarify, organise, reflect, engage. Step three is where setups get overbuilt. People build label taxonomies, energy-level tags, and context lists for a life they don’t lead, and the system becomes a hobby, then a chore, then something they stop opening.

The minimal version is much smaller.

The five views

Every open task lives in exactly one of five places. The Inbox holds everything you capture, before you’ve decided what it means. Capture has to be instant: if adding a task takes more than a couple of seconds you’ll stop doing it, and the system dies at step one.

Today is the short list you chose to finish today, which can be shorter than everything due. Six items is a strong day.

Upcoming is for tasks with a real date: the flight, the renewal, the review meeting. Give a task a date for when it becomes relevant, never for when you aspire to do it. Anytime is the work you could pick up when Today runs dry, the active backlog.

Someday holds the parked ideas you’re explicitly not committing to, and it’s what keeps Anytime honest. Without it, your backlog fills with guilt.

Projects group related tasks. A couple of labels, say errand and deep-work, are plenty. If a label doesn’t change what you’d pick next, delete it.

The two habits that keep it alive

Daily triage takes two minutes. Each morning, empty the Inbox into the right view, then pick Today. You are deciding what “done” means for one day, and leaving the week alone.

The weekly review takes twenty minutes. Skim every project, push stale Anytime items to Someday, pull ripe Someday items back, delete what no longer matters. It’s the step people skip, and skipping it is how systems rot. Put it on a recurring task, inside the system itself.

Run it in any app, or an app that runs it for you

Most task managers can be shaped into these five views. In Todoist that’s a filter set, in TickTick custom smart lists, in Notion a database with views (how Done Bear compares with each). It works, but now you maintain the system, and setups you maintain are setups that drift.

The other option is an app where the five views are the product. Done Bear is built as a GTD app: Inbox, Today, Upcoming, Anytime and Someday are the navigation, plus a Logbook of everything you’ve finished. Nothing to configure, so nothing to break in month three.

Capture and triage only become habits when they’re instant, so Done Bear renders from your device and syncs in the background, and on iPhone, or in a browser where it has loaded before, the Inbox opens as fast offline as online. More on why in what a local-first task manager is.

Everything also has to land in one Inbox, so capture comes from web, desktop, iOS, a Raycast extension, a CLI, and your AI assistant via MCP.

Start smaller than feels right

Whatever app you use: five views, a two-minute triage, a weekly review, and the discipline to keep Today short. Add complexity when a real problem demands it, and ignore features just because the app offers them.

What keeps a system alive is how little there is to keep up.