The GTD Setup That Sticks

TL;DR: GTD setups die of too much structure, not too little. The version that survives is five views (Inbox, Today, Upcoming, Anytime, Someday), a two-minute daily triage, and a weekly review. You can shape most apps into it; in Done Bear it’s the default navigation, which is one less thing to maintain.

Getting Things Done is twenty-five years old and still the most durable idea in personal productivity: 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, organize, reflect, engage. Most abandoned setups die at step three. People build label taxonomies, energy-level tags, and context lists for a life they don’t lead. The system becomes a hobby, then a chore, then a graveyard.

The minimal version is smaller than that.

The five views

Every 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’ve committed to finishing today. Not everything due today, everything you chose today. Six items is a strong day.

Upcoming is for tasks with a real date: the flight, the renewal, the review meeting. A date means “when this becomes relevant,” not “when I 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’re not planning the week, you’re deciding what “done” means for one day.

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 everyone skips and the reason 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. 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 that way: 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.

Two things matter more than they sound. Capture and triage only become habits when they’re instant, so Done Bear renders from your device and syncs in the background, and the Inbox opens as fast offline as online. More on why in Why Offline-First Beats Cloud-Only.

The other is that everything 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, not because the app offers it.

Turns out the thing that keeps a system alive isn’t the structure you built into it. It’s how little there is to keep up.