THE ARTICLE · 7 MIN
Getting Things Done is a book on personal organisation that its publisher calls “one of the most influential business books of its era”. Here are its big ideas in our own words, a check of the claims behind them, and a few small practices drawn from the parts that hold up.
About the book
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is by David Allen, a management consultant and executive coach. Viking Penguin first published it in 2001. A revised edition came out from Penguin Books on 17 March 2015, at 352 pages; the publisher says Allen “has rewritten the book from start to finish”. It is a method book: a step-by-step system for handling everything that lands on your plate, drawn from the author’s years of coaching people at their desks rather than from studies. The 2015 edition added a chapter called “GTD and Cognitive Science”.
We did not read the full printed book. This summary rests on the excerpt on the publisher’s page (the 2001 text: the contents, the introduction and the start of chapter 1), short snippets of the 2015 edition returned by Open Library’s search inside, the David Allen Company’s own description of the method, and the studies behind the claims. Where we could not see the book’s wording, we say so.
The big ideas
1. Your head is a poor place to keep a to-do list
The first chapter of the 2001 text names two aims: capture everything that needs doing “into a logical and trusted system outside of your head and off your mind”, and make decisions up front about each thing, so there is always a plan for the next action. Allen’s company sums it up in a slogan: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
2. Open loops
Allen calls the things you have not dealt with “incompletes” or “open loops”, which he defines as “anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is”. His claim is that each one keeps taking up attention until it is either finished or written down somewhere you trust.
3. Five steps
The method runs in five steps. The David Allen Company now names them capture (collect what has your attention), clarify (decide what each item means and whether it needs action), organize (put reminders where they belong), reflect (review often) and engage (choose what to do and do it). In the 2001 edition the matching chapters were called collection, processing, organizing, reviewing and doing.
4. Decide the next physical action
For each item that needs doing, you decide the very next physical, visible step. (Our example: “call the dentist to book a check-up” rather than “teeth”.) Anything that needs more than one action becomes a project, which goes on a projects list. In the 2015 edition Allen writes that, in Baumeister’s model, deciding the next action is enough “planning”, as long as the reminder is kept somewhere you trust you will look at before long.
5. The two-minute rule
If an action will take less than two minutes, Allen says it should be done straight away. His reason is that two minutes is roughly where filing and tracking a task takes longer than just doing it: “the efficiency cutoff”.
6. Review the whole system regularly
The fourth step, reflect, is described by the company as “Update and review all pertinent system contents to regain control and focus.” In the book this becomes a Weekly Review, in which you go through your lists and refresh them once a week. Allen says the Weekly Review is “so critical” that it deserves a set time and place of its own.
7. Mind like water
Allen borrows an image from karate, “mind like water”, which he uses for a state of perfect readiness, and asks you to picture a pebble thrown into a still pond. Getting back to that state, with all your faculties working, is what the system is for.
What holds up
The part with the most support is the simplest one: writing down what you have to do, with a concrete next step, seems to stop it nagging at you. A 2011 set of studies and online memory experiments point that way, and a one-night sleep study fits with it, though each is small or narrow, and we found no replication of the 2011 studies or the sleep study. The book states its science more firmly than this: the 2015 edition says research “has now proven” that open loops drain attention, and its chapter on cognitive science cites the 2011 paper. The older idea that unfinished tasks stick in memory did not hold up in a 2025 meta-analysis, and the method as a whole has not been tested. The rows below give each claim, the verdict and the source.
One more study is worth knowing about. In 2018 Michael Scullin and colleagues had 57 healthy young adults write for five minutes before a night in a sleep lab. Those who wrote a to-do list for the next few days fell asleep faster than those who wrote about tasks they had already finished, by about nine minutes on average. Among those who wrote to-do lists, the more specific the list, the faster they fell asleep. There was no group that wrote nothing, so the authors could not say whether the to-do list helped or the list of finished tasks got in the way; what the data show, they write, is that writing about future tasks beat writing about completed ones. It was one night in a lab, and the authors call for a trial in people with and without sleep problems.
How to use it
These practices come only from the parts that hold up. They describe what people do; what fits your work is your call.
- Writing a specific plan for what is nagging you. In Masicampo and Baumeister’s first study, the plan described how, when and where each task would be done, and that was enough to remove the intrusive thoughts in the lab. This is close to the book’s habit of writing down a next action for every open item.
- Putting reminders outside your head. In Gilbert’s online experiments, setting reminders improved performance, and people leaned on them more when they had more to remember. The book’s calendar and lists are reminders of this kind.
- Writing the next few days’ list at bedtime. In Scullin’s study, five minutes spent on a to-do list before bed was followed by falling asleep faster than five minutes spent on a list of finished tasks. It was one night in a lab with healthy young adults, with no group that wrote nothing, so it is not a test of a sleep treatment.
Who it’s for, and who can skip it
It suits people who feel buried by e-mail, errands and half-finished projects, and who want a complete system rather than a few tips. Its strongest support is the plain idea of getting commitments out of your head with a clear next step. Readers who already keep a reliable list and calendar will find much of the method familiar, and people who dislike detailed systems may find the full set of lists and reviews more than they need. Its science is best read as the author’s interpretation, checked against the studies.
If you liked this
- Deep Work, summarised: another book summary, on focus and the research on switching between unfinished tasks.
- Atomic Habits, summarised, on habits, cues and if-then plans, checked against the research.
- How to read a study without a science degree, for the questions to ask of the small lab studies behind books like this one.
Sources
- D. Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (Viking Penguin, 2001; revised edition, Penguin Books, 2015): publisher’s page and excerpt; snippets of the 2015 edition returned by Open Library’s search inside.
- David Allen Company, “What is GTD?” and “About”.
- E. J. Masicampo and R. F. Baumeister, “Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (2011).
- R. Ghibellini and B. Meier, “Interruption, recall and resumption: a meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects”, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12 (2025).
- S. J. Gilbert, “Strategic offloading of delayed intentions into the external environment”, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 68 (2015); E. F. Risko and S. J. Gilbert, “Cognitive offloading”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (2016).
- M. K. Scullin et al., “The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 147 (2018).
- F. Heylighen and C. Vidal, “Getting Things Done: the science behind stress-free productivity”, Long Range Planning 41 (2008); authors’ preprint.
Checked October 2026. What we read: the excerpt on the publisher’s page (the 2001 text: contents, introduction and the start of chapter 1), short snippets of the 2015 edition returned by Open Library’s search inside (the book itself is lending-only, so we saw only those snippets), the David Allen Company’s pages, and the studies listed above (abstracts, plus the full text of the 2011 paper, the 2018 sleep study and the 2008 paper). We did not read the printed book.
- book summary
- productivity
- to do lists
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- fact check