Ultimate Guide to GTD in 2022: Amplenote Edition

So in today's video, we're going to be exploring the best ways to implement getting things done, or GTD for short, in 2022. Do not worry if you have not yet read the book or heard about the book; we're going to look at why these concepts work and how to help apply them to your own productivity systems.

So, in today's video, we'll be using Ample Notes as our way to create a GTD system from scratch. Ample Note is completely free, and today they're sponsoring the feature, and you can check them out in the link in the description.

Now, David Allen's book was originally published in 2001, and it's become quite the hit over the years, still being pretty relevant today as a productivity system that has stood the test of time.

Now, GTD focuses a lot on a lot of shortcomings that are in task management. Here are a few of those:

Number one, everything goes inside of an inbox: chores, projects, ideas, thoughts, reminders. The more tasks you enter into an inbox, the less you have to remember.

Number two, it should always be clear what to work on next. As time goes on and you accumulate more and more tasks, longer lists can become pretty overwhelming. Organizing your tasks into projects and context can give you that clarity of what you need to work on next without much more effort.

Number three, your to-do list needs a periodic review. Reviews help you to stay with an application longer and also help you to build a trusted productivity system so that it is relevant to whatever you're doing in your life.

So, Ample Note is the sponsor of today's feature, but it is an all-in-one application for tasks and notes. Ample Note's design and feel is centered around a concept called the idea execution funnel. You can see this on Ample Note's website, but the idea execution funnel describes the lifetime of an idea all the way to the point where you schedule it inside of your calendar and sort of activate it, ready to get done.

If you're using GTD in your life, you'll know that the inbox and the point of an inbox is to help you to remember things that come into your system across a day. Now, if you're anything like me, you've probably been stressed or had some anxiety build up around whether you've remembered something in your routine. At some point, I even get my wife to text me things that I'm going to forget, which is awful, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

This book, David Allen proposes five distinct sections or categories of the Getting Things Done process, and what we're going to do is start with the first phase of that, which is collect. The de facto inbox in Ample Notes is the daily note, which you can visit by navigating to the jots mode. Your jots are automatically created and titled after today's date. It's like getting a new empty sheet of paper every day. You can start using it right away to write down what's on your mind.

Now, inside of Ample Note, this page is also tagged automatically, which means your daily notes can be separate from your other notes. Now, all you need to do is start adding tasks. The nice thing about the inbox is that the structure is not important at this point. In fact, the harder it is to capture the task, the less likely that you will do it consistently, so keep it simple for now and leave the organizing for later.

Now for when you are on the go, it's very easy to capture on the Ample Note mobile application. Any tasks added this way end up in your jots for you to review later, and it's really important when it comes to capturing stuff on the go, because a lot of the time that's where we are: out and about and in the field, and that's when our ideas tend to spring on us most.

Next, we're going to look at the next phase of GTD: clarify and organize. We're going to look at how that applies to the tasks that you've captured already in your inbox. So inside of Ample Note, tasks mode is one of the best places for organizing your tasks, and that's because it brings the tasks from the daily jot into a single location.

This is very handy and it means I don't have to visit each daily jot individually. Now, in this phase of GTD, our goal is to move tasks out of the inbox. So let's look over an example. The first thing I noticed about this task is that it's actually a recurring task, so I will make it repeat every three days after completion.

Also, I can only complete this task while I'm at home, so I shouldn't have to see it, for example, when I'm in the office. Therefore, I will go ahead and tag it with my at-home context. Adding a context to a task is useful to describe how, where, and with whom that task needs to get done.

Finally, another way to organize your tasks is by the projects they are part of. Inside of Ample Note, you can delimit a project by creating a new note for it, so I'll move this task to my chores note. At the end of the clarify and organize, your inbox should be empty.

So now we've gone through the collect phase of GTD, and we've looked at the clarify and organize to help us clear that inbox and process them. Now let's talk about ways that we can actually start taking our tasks out of the system.

Inside of Ample Note, navigating to tasks mode will show you a list of tasks you've created across your notes. This is useful sometimes, but most times, it's just pretty overwhelming. The more realistic way to look at your responsibilities is based on the location you are in.

So, for example, if I'm in the office, I can filter my to-do to show me tasks that I've tagged ‘at office’. The list is still pretty long, so we can do better than that. I can now filter out the tasks that are marked with ‘at waiting’, since these items are waiting for input from other colleagues.

Now I'm left with a list of things I can actually do something about. While tasks mode is pretty great, you'll spend most of your engaged time in calendar mode. Now, the view is very simple: your list of tasks is on the right and your schedule’s on the left.

Whenever I want to make a plan, I can apply a list of filters to my tasks. For example, I'll zoom in on my ‘at next’ tasks and simply drag and drop some of them onto the calendar.

So let's recap everything you've done: a great job! We've built a very minimal structure of the GTD system. We've seen how daily jots can be used inside an inbox, how to clarify and organize your contacts, and how to engage your tasks inside of tasks mode and calendar mode.

Next, we're actually going to stop and look at the more advanced techniques of GTD, but first I want to pass over to my friend RJ Nestor to explore the advantages about getting things done in a tool for thought.

I'm RJ Nestor, productivity coach. I ran GTD in Todoist from 2014 to 2020 and enjoyed it a lot, but then I discovered the power of GTD in tools for thought when I started using Rome Research in March of 2020. Since then, I've created courses to help others build their productivity systems in tools for thought and I've also written a newsletter that goes out every couple of weeks about productivity in tools for thought.

So, why do I think that getting things done runs better in tools for thought? Well, first of all, GTD is an iterative process, which is much easier in a tool for thought than it is in a task app. You capture in your inbox, you revisit that again when you process that. From there into your project, and you tag it appropriately. You revisit it again when you surface those tasks and you choose the ones that you want to work on.

We gradually refine our tasks and our work, and tools for thought lend themselves to that in a way that task apps simply don't. The second reason: task context can live with them alongside the task itself naturally and easily.

Sure, in a task app, you can add a comment, but in a tool for thought, that task can stay among the ideas that generated it, and still be organized into a system. That level of context is far beyond anything that you could add to a task comment. But most importantly, you can go from the seed of an idea to the full project implementation in the same environment. Context switching costs are eliminated when you're not bouncing from one environment to another as you move through the various stages of a project and do that work.

So why Ample Note specifically? In Rome, Obsidian, Logseq, others, you can build a structure that does this. In Ample Note, that task iteration process is already built in. The phases of GTD are beautifully echoed in Ample Note's idea execution funnel.

For example, jots—the place in Ample Note that you can collect all of your ideas, your tasks, and projects. That capture is essential for a usable GTD system. Then on your notes pages, you can clarify and organize, helping you make sense of your ideas as you revisit them.

You can structure them so you know what needs to happen and what relies on what, and in what order things need to occur. Your tasks and calendar views allow you to engage. People who get frustrated with GTD usually do so because they get hung up here. They can generate lists, but they can't get stuff off the list. The lists just get bigger and bigger, and eventually, they give up.

By not only helping to refine your notes into tasks, but also then nudging you to time block those tasks with a calendar mode, Ample Note helps overcome this common GTD problem.

So, in short, tools for thought supercharge getting things done, and Ample Note is specifically aligned with those tenets of GTD so that you can focus on the work that is truly important to you.

All right, super job RJ! Let's look at now those more advanced GTD techniques and start applying them so you can apply all of your tasks. Now you've also learned how to organize and process them effectively, and you've also got a strategy for adding context to them so that you know what to work on next.

The final phase of GTD is called reflect, and it's a great way for you to view your list of tasks and make sure they align with your actual interests and priorities at this given time and in the future. You can instruct Ample Note to remind you to review your projects by creating a recurring task. I will call this one ‘Review the list of projects monthly’, and I'll make it repeat every 30 days.

But we can go a little bit further with this, and I can create a brand new note that will act as a dashboard for all of my projects. Then I can make a list of all of my projects in this note, and in fact, I will make a list of links for my project notes. Now, once a month, Ample Note will remind me to review my to-do list. When that happens, all I have to do is copy my project dashboard to my daily jot, and then I can start working through my projects, writing down some observations under the same name of each project.

Due to how bi-directional linking works in Ample Note, visiting the note of a project shows me a chronological record of past mentions of the project, and this makes it very easy to keep track and review the progress I've been making. So you can think of reviews as an opportunity to bring Ample Note up to date with what's going on in your life.

The most common operations you might do when reviewing your projects are: cross off tasks that you have completed in the meantime, delete tasks that are no longer relevant, clarify the tasks that you didn't progress on, and update the next action that needs to be done to move the project forward, and that's the GTD review step.

Now, in the previous section, we covered how to actually implement the collect phase of GTD system using daily jots. Now, here are a few more ways in which you can capture tasks inside of Ample Note:

By forwarding emails into your direct Ample Note address, by using the Chrome and Firefox extensions for web clipping, and by using the quick task menu from calendar mode or from your mobile app.

Create and organize projects and contacts by looking over some examples. Now, projects are born when one of your tasks is too large and can be broken down into multiple steps. Now, for example, I should probably convert my ‘Purchase a Kindle’ task into a project. Now, in terms of what is the possible next action, I should first research 2021 Kindle models and then search for used models.

In GTD, marking the next action can be done by using the 'at next' tag. You should apply this tag to the task that needs to be done next in order for the project to advance. Now, if you have tasks that advance the project but can't yet be done, for example, because they depend on other tasks, you shouldn't tag them with ‘at next’.

Marking next actions usually happens in the reflect phase. Now this removes the planning and decision-making from the engage step, which makes it easier to start actually doing the work. Finally, I like to tag my project notes with ‘GTD Projects’ to keep them organized.

Finally, we're going to talk about the calendar mode. Calendars can help you visualize your to-do list in a totally different dimension, so this can really help us by giving a visual sense of where our time is spent.

It can really take you from prioritizing your time because it gives you that sense of, okay, I have this limited time; it's more finite-focused. Calendars can be really helpful in a healthy approach to your productivity, reducing burnout.

Because essentially what you're doing is you're time blocking versus aiming to complete the task as a whole, which is something that a lot of people tend to do more aggressively. You can incorporate breaks, and you can also really help yourself plan better in advance with the calendar element of this experience.

So, in this section of the video, let's look at some of the unique strengths that calendar mode has in relation to GTD. Number one, calendar mode as a GTD inbox. Now, we've already seen how to use calendar mode to capture tasks to the inbox and process that inbox itself.

The other inbox feature of calendar mode is the list of overdue tasks at the top of the sidebar. Now, these are items that were scheduled in the past but were not completed. Number two, calendar mode for organizing tasks. The sidebar also shows me a list of unscheduled tasks. While normally these tasks could live in many different notes, calendar mode centralizes them in this to-do list, thus reducing a lot of friction to clear my inbox.

All I have to do is to process them like I would normally do, such as adding contacts, projects, and due dates. Number three, calendar mode for engaging. Whenever you have a list of to-dos, David Allen's GTD proposes that you choose what to work on next by using a set of criteria such as task context, the time you have available, and the energy level required.

Inside of Ample Note, you can use something called task score. By sorting my to-do list by score, I can get a summary of the most actionable items based on previous judgments I made about these tasks. Some of the most predominant factors that influence task score are whether I've marked the task as important or urgent.

Finally, in Ample Note, you can import events from external calendars, such as Google or Outlook, and this makes calendar mode the most reliable source of truth when it comes to your obligations. When you see your events and your tasks on your calendar, you can make plans without having to worry about conflicts in your schedule.

So, we've covered the entire GTD system. It's time for you to go away and apply this knowledge. First of all, I want to say a huge thank you for stopping by in today's video, but I wanted you to share something you've learned in today's video in the comments below.

So a huge, huge thank you to Ample Note for sponsoring today's feature. A big, big thank you for them to come on and to dive into this complex experience. So thank you very much! If you are new here, please do subscribe to keep productive. It'd be amazing to have you here in this community. If you enjoyed the video, like, comment, and share it with a friend who is maybe using GTD and wants to take it to that next level.

Anyway, folks, I want to say a big, big thank you, and I'll see you all very soon. Cheerio!

Advanced projects and context now, two of the most practical GTD concepts are projects and context. Two of the most—sorry, it's my wife; I hate when she texts me when I film. I should just turn my volume off. Done! Productivity hack!