Step 5: Master the Key Habits of GTD®

If you’ve been following along sequentially, you’ve set the stage for your productivity success. You’ve:

1. Got an understanding of the GTD methodology

2. Committed to Evernote as your GTD tool

3. Become savvy with Evernote’s feature set

4. Deployed the workflow it takes to manage all aspects of GTD in Evernote

If you were building a greenhouse to grow plants year-round, at this point, you’ll have a structure in place for your garden to thrive under any weather conditions. You'll also know what soil you need, what seeds to plant in which beds, how often to water and prune, what garden tools to use, and what fertilizer will support your harvest goals. The work of planting the seeds, tilling the soil, and tending to your growing garden is ready to begin. It’s time to get to work!

It’s the same with GTD. 

With these four framework pieces in place, you’re ready to actually execute successful GTD. You’ve got everything in place to properly practice GTD habits for a lifetime, without needing to reinvent your system as your life evolves. And, you’ll weather any storm life throws at you.

Success Factor #5. GTD Habit Formation

GTD is really a series of habits and best practices that transform your productivity. The question is, are you practicing the habits? Thinking about them doesn’t count. Does your GTD system support making practicing the habits easier?

Here are the key GTD habits – the practice of GTD – that will get you the promise of the book: stress-free productivity.

1: Capturing anything and everything that has your attention. 

Is 100% of what you want to retain for any reason kept in a trusted system outside your mind? Or, are you guilty of relying on your brain to just remember that one little thing? (remind me...what was that thing again????)

Think about how many places you come across in your daily life where you see something you want to take action on or retain. Each of these locations is an “in box” and if I asked you to estimate how many in boxes you have in your life, what would you say? 

If you’re like most people, you recognize your email as a massive in box. But this is just the start.

• Your physical in-tray at your desk. 

• You might also recognize that your brain is a big in box – you think of things in the shower, or while at your computer working. 

• What about Slack?

• And Facebook messenger? 

• Don’t forget about those text messages waiting for your reply.

• Also voicemail. 

• And that LinkedIn message you want to reply to.

• And, what about your camera roll on your phone – those photos you took of random things because you wanted to remember something about them or share them with someone. 

• The article you saw on the internet...gotta remember to read that. 

• Also, the PDF you downloaded from the website to your downloads folder - you need to fill out that form.

It goes on, and on, and on. It’s not uncommon to have 20 or more “in boxes”. 

This makes having a tool like Evernote – one that offers you the ability to effortlessly capture and retain any digital format in one central spot – essential to the effective GTD capture habit. It’s the leading capture tool on the market and offers the least amount of friction for capturing no matter if you're on your phone or computer. 

The more you understand about Evernote (success factor #3), the more effortless capture becomes. And, since capture is the first of David Allen’s 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow, by capturing in Evernote, you’ve set yourself up to execute on the remaining 4 steps in the same tool. No need to switch apps to clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. You’re set up for effectiveness and efficiency by capturing to Evernote. 

2: Defining actionable items into discrete outcomes and concrete next steps. 

Which is your to-do list most like?

If it’s list #1, you aren’t in the habit of creating next-actions lists for your projects and you aren’t setting yourself up for GTD success.

When you understand the GTD methodology (GTD success step #1) you understand how David coaches us on the difference between projects and next-actions. And, he teaches us how to do focused thinking around defining next actions on our projects during “Clarify” – the 2nd step in his 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow. 

The habit of defining next-actions becomes much simpler to practice when you’re working in the same tool that you captured to (Evernote - GTD success step #2). And, it’s easier to practice this habit when you have a clear place to organize your next actions (step 3 of the 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow). This is the benefit of having a comprehensive GTD workflow setup up in Evernote (GTD success step #3).

3: The weekly review. 

Are you reviewing your entire GTD workflow at regular intervals? Or do you resist this? This essential step is the glue that holds your GTD practice together and keeps your thumb on the pulse of your priorities in the constantly changing context of your life.

At some point in their practice, all GTD’ers resist doing the weekly review – even David Allen admitted to struggling with it when on-stage at the GTD Summit. Since the weekly review is the secret sauce that makes GTD work – it’s essential your GTD system makes it as easy as possible to review.

David defines the weekly review as a time to get clear, current, and creative. It isn’t hard to see the benefit of doing this regularly. 

So why don’t people do it?

The weekly review feels hard. But it’s really not. 

The real problem is that your GTD setup and habits don’t tee you up for weekly review ease and success.  

Over my years of coaching GTD practitioners, I’ve identified three key hurdles that keep people from actually doing a weekly review.

Weekly Review Hurdle #1: The stuff you’ve captured is fragmented across multiple tools. 

It’s nearly impossible to review the landscape of your life if things are split between multiple tools. You understand if you’ve ever asked yourself “Now, where was that doc?” and find yourself searching in email, Google Docs, and then Slack hoping to find it.

When you rely on multiple locations to review everything that's on your plate, you’re doing more work than you need to in order to review your system. You also miss the opportunity to cross-reference related materials that live in different apps. And, you're at risk for violating GTD habit #1: Capturing everything that has your attention.

But, when centralized in one tool for your storage, project management, support materials, task management, and idea management – as Evernote enables you to do – there’s no app switching involved. You search and you find. You organize, review, and prioritize, all in one spot. Easy peasy.

Weekly Review Hurdle #2: You don’t have a proper workflow in place so you don’t know where to organize your stuff.

As you saw in success factor #4, a proper workflow is essential to an effective GTD practice. This matters especially during the weekly review. You’ve got to have a spot to organize everything that you’ve captured, or else it doesn't get processed. Suddenly you’re crushed in an avalanche of digital clutter and the weekly review is frustrating (not freeing).

Weekly Review Hurdle #3: You aren’t processing on a regular basis.

This one’s a biggie. Over the years, I’ve seen that if success factors 1-4 are in place and you still aren’t getting to the weekly review, you don’t actually have a weekly review problem – you have an in box processing problem.

Here’s what’s happening: You capture great! You do an excellent job of collecting everything that has your attention. You get a gold star for step one of the 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow. 

But, you don’t process – steps 2 (capture) and 3 (clarify) of the 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow – on a regular basis. You save this until the weekly review.

You need to develop a habit of daily processing for 25 minutes (one Pomodoro). 

This frees you up so that all you have to do during your weekly review is step 4 – Reflect. 

Suddenly, you’ll be able to complete your weekly review. It works like magic.

Form the Habits

Mastering these cornerstone habits is the work of a successful GTD practice:

• capturing anything and everything that has your attention

• defining actionable items into discrete outcomes and concrete next steps

• and doing your weekly review – which requires a sub-habit of creating a daily in box processing habit

When these habits are how you operate, you’re in the rhythm of practicing effective GTD, and the final step of the 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow – engage – just happens.

At this point, you should be clear about what it takes to succeed with GTD. 

You might even have a new excitement for the practice. Clarity is a great thing. Now it’s time to take action and apply all 5 of these principles to your life

I’ve given you the recipe to success. Stop reading. Go forth and run with it! 

If you’re still reading, you likely suffer from one final GTD truth:

Enthusiasm is common. Commitment is rare. 

The 5 success factors I’ve outlined in these pages are what it takes to be effective with GTD. And, they work. They also represent a significant shift in knowledge and behavior in multiple areas. 

To commit, you have to believe it will work (legions of GTD Practitioners can confirm it does). You also have to experience the benefits for yourself (follow my steps and you will) and trust that with consistent practice the benefits will unveil themselves over time (they do). 

GTD is a deep practice with multiple levels of mastery – David spends the entire final chapter of GTD addressing this. Faithful GTD practitioners know that GTD is so much more than a methodology. It’s a way of life. There’s no “end” to GTD. Instead, how you think, process, and do on a daily basis evolves. Over time, GTD becomes how you function.

So, what is your best way to bridge the gap from where you are today to living an effortless GTD lifestyle? 

The Observer gives some insights into the problem and solution for habit formation:

“Knowing what to do is not an issue, COMMITTING to it is the problem! Many of us lack the proper structures to support the behavioural changes our life goals require.”

How to create structure:

Your GTD success will be greatly amplified by adding community, accountability, and coaching to your practice – these are the structural ingredients needed to create new GTD habits.

That’s why I’ve created the EverDone Forum, an exclusive space within my Academy membership just for EverDone System customers, explicitly designed to support your GTD habit formation over time.

It’s a private, filtered, and engaged community of GTD practitioners all using the same tool – success factor #2 (Evernote), and the same workflow – success factor #4 (EverDone).

You’re suddenly not alone in your GTD practice. You’re with “your people” and everyone’s collectively working on establishing the GTD habits taught in this article. You’ve become a master of your productivity.

This is accomplished in several ways. 

First, through Academy trainings, tutorials, live events, and discussions, you get access to the Evernote skills needed to work all 5 stages of mastering workflow in the most efficient and frictionless way possible,.

Then, within the EverDone Forum, through a series of live virtual events, only for EverDone Academy members. These guided weekly reviews and co-working sessions provide much-needed accountability and the dose of coaching required for you to move forward – and actually experience – the power of practicing the key GTD habits. 

It’s incredible the progress you can make when you commit to attending a virtual EverDone session. Your EverDone coach (me!) hosts the session and provides coaching tips along the way. And, it’s powerful and fun to work on GTD alongside your fellow community members and learn from their questions and ideas they share in the chat.

You’ll quickly learn that productivity is contagious. When you’re around productive people, you’re more productive.

And both the EverDone Forum and the Academy provide an active learning space where you get access to your new EverDone GTD friends and coaching in the form of direct interaction with me (post your questions – get my answer). There’s also some extra bonus trainings to support your EverDone GTD practice.

It’s the accountability piece you’ve been missing to practice and build the essential GTD habits that make your practice click.

Mastering Success Factor #5:

Focus on the cornerstone GTD habits presented above. Make them all part of your way of life. 

Determine if you have a better chance for stress-free productivity by going at it alone. Or would you thrive faster with accountability and coaching?

Going solo? 
Here’s a tip I suggest in EverDone: Use the Pomodoro technique to time-block your way to forming strong GTD habits. Get yourself a Pomodoro timer and make it a priority to build these GTD habits as the cornerstone of your GTD practice.

Seeking support?
If you’re anything like me, you know that accountability and coaching is a quicker path to success. Your next action is to invest in accountability with your EverDone System purchase. Your purchase includes lifetime access to the EverDone Guide, and also 3 months access to The Academy where you’ll get the in-depth and the practical Evernote skills training it takes to master Evernote and make every aspect of your GTD practice more efficient. This includes access to the EverDone Academy Forum – a special space inside the Academy exclusively for EverDone System members.

Inside the EverDone Academy Forum, you’ll find the coaching, community, and accountability it takes to build effective GTD habits. You get:

• Community: A filtered, engaged group of active GTD practitioners, all using Evernote and the EverDone organization as their GTD tool.

• Accountability: Access to reoccuring live events, each designed to support you in getting things done. Events include a monthly guided weekly reviews and a weekly co-working session.

• Coaching: You get access to me. Post your questions in the Forum, and get answers.

Access to this exclusive space is included with your EverDone system purchase which includes 3 months of Academy membership.