I tried doing this as my last thing each day but it didn’t stick. I have a recurring task to sort my Inbox at 7:30 every morning which is usually the time I am sitting down at my desk. The power of being able to just type out something like “follow up with Geoff in 2 months #work” and never have to think about it again is the biggest thing that improves my productivity and also my mental health. If I know when it needs to be done I can allocate the due date then in natural language and forget about it. If the task can be done straight away and within 5 minutes this is the only time it doesn’t get added because I will complete that task straight away. Whenever any tasks arise I use the Mac shortcut or the widget on iOS to quickly add it to my inbox. Having tried almost all the major task managers, I am sure most people would agree that Todoist does it best for just dumping everything in and this is the reason why I struggle to take to any other app.

All my tasks from heavy-duty projects to simple reminders start life as a string of text in my inbox. More or less everything starts life in here. This isn’t a GTD set up, but it’s my set up and it all starts with the Inbox. I would love you all to give Todoist a try here. This set up has been how I get everything done daily and also why I forget loads of meaningless stuff. I never set levels of tasks that I HAVE to get done each day, but I DO aim to get 3 main things ticked off each working day. The basis of this revolves around “offloading your brain” so you can focus on other things. Even though he is a strong believer in the ability of Things, and also everyone in the repliesseems to think the Todoist design is trash, I think very much that we have the same outlook on GTD. No apologies here, but I ripped off this idea directly from Matt Birchler’s write-up on his Things set up.

Todoist and gtd