The GTD Workflow Map, Explained

Editor's Note: GTD in the AI Era

Last updated: February 2026

Brooks and I have been practicing GTD for over a decade each. His walkthrough of the workflow map below is still the clearest explanation I've seen, and it's the one I send to everyone who asks me how to get started with GTD.

Here's what I want to add: GTD in 2026 looks different from GTD in 2005, even though the principles are identical. The capture-clarify-organize-reflect-engage framework hasn't changed. What has changed is the tools.

I was coaching a client last month who had 1,100 unread emails. She was using her inbox as a todo list, which meant important tasks were buried between newsletters and promotional emails. We spent one session setting up SaneBox to filter the noise and Granola to capture action items as they emerged. Within a week, she went from drowning to having a clear inbox and a workflow that actually moved things forward. That's GTD in practice, with modern tools doing the heavy lifting on the capture and clarify steps.

The biggest shift I've seen is in the “What is the next action?” step. AI tools like Claude can now take a vague project description and break it into concrete next actions in seconds. I used to spend 30 minutes during my weekly review clarifying projects. Now I paste my project notes into an AI chat and get a clean list of next actions back almost instantly. The thinking still happens in my head, but the processing is dramatically faster.

A few specific tool updates since Brooks wrote this:

Modern GTD Apps. Things 3 is still excellent for Mac/iOS users. Todoist has gotten significantly better with natural language input and AI task suggestions. TickTick has emerged as a strong cross-platform option with built-in Pomodoro timers and calendar integration. For teams, Asana and Monday.com both support GTD-style workflows. We wrote a full comparison in our Best GTD Apps article.

AI-Powered Capture. Voice capture has replaced a lot of my manual typing. I use Whisperflow to dictate tasks and notes throughout the day. The transcription is nearly perfect, and it removes the friction of pulling out your phone and typing. If you've struggled with the capture habit, voice input might be the thing that makes it stick.

The Weekly Review is Still King. AI can help with processing and organizing, but nothing replaces sitting down once a week to review your projects, check your waiting-for list, and plan the week ahead. Brooks mentions this at the end of his article, and I want to double down on it. The weekly review is the one GTD habit that separates people who get results from people who just have a nice app on their phone.

Brooks' full workflow walkthrough is below. If you're new to GTD, print his flowchart, hang it somewhere visible, and reference it every time you process your inbox. That's exactly what he did when he first started, and it's still the best way to internalize the system.

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[Original article starts: “Getting Things Done, aka GTD, has been a foundational productivity system…” and continues]

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Getting Things Done, aka GTD, has been a foundational productivity system in my career.

Have you ever had just the right discovery come to you at just the right time? For me, that time was the mid-2000s, and that discovery was the book Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Here’s an action shot of a depressingly younger-looking me having some sort of intense conversation. Check out those phone books holding up the big CRT monitors.

There are some things to note on the cubicle wall behind me:

Behind my head is something you can’t see in this picture — a printed-out copy of the GTD workflow map.

I was a new Getting Things Done adoptee, and the Getting Things Done flowchart helped me stay on track and make quick decisions.

Reading the Getting Things Done book is one thing, but putting it into practice is another. I found having a GTD workflow map handy at all times extremely helpful.

GTD is an excellent tool for helping you be productive. It certainly changed my life, and our GTD articles and podcasts have helped thousands of people.

In this article, I will take you through the GTD workflow that we use internally here at AE, and I'll give you tips and action steps for each stage.

By the way, if you want a nice printable comprehensive GTD flowchart, the official GTD shop sells one for $10.

The GTD Workflow Map

Here is the Getting Things Done workflow map we use internally at AE:

The beauty of this flowchart is that you can use it when you are first implementing GTD and wading through the backlog, when you are catching up, and on an ongoing basis.

Inbox: Where the “stuff” in your life goes 📥

Think about how things come into your life. You may have:

The list goes on and on. In a perfect world, collecting ideas and capturing all of this would go to one place, but most of us don’t live in that world. Not a problem.

The key is to identify all of the areas that information comes into your work and personal life, so nothing gets missed.

In the GTD workflow parlance, this is Capture. Going with our example above, we might have these inboxes:

Once you have identified your inboxes, you'll have a management place (or places) to process your information from.

There is one important rule that comes straight out of the GTD book:

Never put anything back into “in.”

This means that once you are processing, you need to take the paper, text message, email, or note through the process.

It doesn’t mean that you need to do the action associated with it (and in fact, you rarely want to do this), but it does mean that if you look at an email, it ideally should not stay in your inbox. It should go somewhere.

If you open a piece of mail, it should go somewhere. It shouldn’t go back into the big pile on your kitchen counter or desk.

Easier said than done, but we’ll talk about that somewhere as we go through this article.

What Is It? 🔍

This might sound obvious, but it can be a surprisingly nuanced question.

Have you ever been in this situation? You get an email or a piece of snail mail and glance at it, but you don’t feel like dealing with it, so you set it aside.

Then later, you find out that it was something important, and if you had just looked at it for another 30 seconds, you could have avoided a negative situation.

Or the flip side happens: you hang on to something “just in case,” but you realize weeks or years later that this paper was cluttering up your life for no good reason. You didn’t need it after all.

So the first step is to identify what the thing you’re looking at is. Then you can figure out what to do with it.

Is It Actionable? ⚡️

Here’s where we get to the most crucial question in the Getting Things Done Workflow Map: is there an action associated with this thing that I am looking at?

The idea I jotted down: should I do something with it?

The note in my kids’ backpack: do I need to pay for something by a specific date, or will I miss it and feel like the worst parent ever?

Is that email a vital piece of information I’ll need when I get farther along in my project, or is it Andrew in IT cc’ing everyone and grandstanding again?

The actionable/non-actionable question is one of the most critical parts of the GTD workflow (the weekly review is the most), and it will determine what you should do with this input.

No, It Is Not Actionable 👎

Let’s say there is no action item associated with the item. For example, reference material. What do you do with it?

As mentioned earlier, here is what you do not do: put it back in your inbox to deal with later.

If an item is not actionable, you should do one of three things:

Yes, It Is Actionable 👍

You’ve identified that yes, there is an action associated with this item. Maybe you need to call or email someone. Perhaps it’s the start of a new big project that your boss just dropped on you. Or maybe one of the kids on your son’s soccer team got a red card last game, and since you are the manager, you need to deal with it (I may be projecting here.)

Actionable items can be challenging to deal with because where do you start? You may receive 2 Microsoft Teams messages that are a sentence each from the same person: one of them might take you ten seconds to answer, the other may turn into a six-month project.

You want to start by asking yourself…

What Is The Next Action? 👉

The next action is a core concept of the Getting Things Done book, which defines it as:

The next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.

In other words, what do you need to do next? “Create a report” is not the next action, but “Review report requirements that Desiree sent” could be.

This example brings up another concept of the GTD method: the idea of a Project. If something takes two or more steps, you should record that as a Project.

Plan Project Steps 📋

You’ll want to keep track of the projects you have open so that you can understand when you have “open loops.” If you have a project with no next actions, you know that you potentially have something missing.

So, if the item you are reviewing has more multiple steps, you’d at the very least plan what the next action for that project is.

At this point, it becomes handy to take a look at Getting Things Done apps to help keep track of your projects and next actions, but it is not strictly required.

Whether something is a single action or the next action as part of a bigger project, you will then want to ask yourself…

Can It Be Done in 2 Minutes or Less? ✌️

This is known as the “2-Minute Rule”. The 2-minute rule is one of those powerful productivity concepts that too many of us ignore, and doing so leads to bloated tasks lists and unnecessary backlogs.

The concept is simple: if you can do the associated task in two minutes or less, then…

Just Do It! 🏁

Complete it right then and there! Can the email be answered within 2 minutes? Answer it! Will responding to that Slack message take less than 2 minutes? Respond! Will paying online for the kids’ field trip take less than 2 minutes? Whip out your phone and pay it!

By knocking off those 2-minute tasks then and there, you’ll have a lean task list that truly contains things that require your focus.

By the way, the two-minute number is entirely arbitrary. Some people follow a “5 Minute Rule”, and that’s fine. Adjust as desired.

Whatever your number is, what if a task will take longer than that? Should you still just do it then and there? Maybe! But more likely, this is not the right time and place for it. In that case, you want to…

Put It In Your System 🏎

Many productivity systems fail because they don’t have a “place” for actionable items, or if they do, that place is not used.

The GTD method doesn't say what your “place” should be — for better or for worse, that is up to you.

When you evaluate that next action that will take more than two minutes, chances are you will do one of two things:

Delegate It ⏳

It may be that the next action is not something you will do. However, you still want to keep track of it. The traditional GTD way is to put it on a “Waiting For” list. This might be a list you wish to review, or you may want to use a more advanced system that lets you assign an action item to that person.

Either way, you want to have visibility on it so that you keep on top of it and revisit as necessary during your GTD weekly review. At that point, the item may move from something on your “Waiting For” list to something where you need to take action, even if that action is harassing a co-worker.

Defer It 🔋

If an actionable item is more than two minutes, there is likely a better time to work on it.

By deferring it, you are setting yourself up for success by making sure you remember to work on it when the time is right.

That might involve:

Do The Work

Of course, all this will help you stay on top of the crazy amount of information that comes at you, but eventually, you need to do the things in your trusted system. Getting Things Done will help there too.

When you make decisions about what to work on, you will, of course, have time-specific items (things that are due today or on a specific date), but other than that, you can evaluate your Next Actions list by…

Don't Forget The Weekly Review

Having a workflow map like this makes implementing the GTD methodology so much easier, but there is one critical factor that will truly help you achieve the promised “stress free productivity”: the weekly review. We recorded a podcast about the weekly review, and have some weekly review consistency tips here.

As I found by hanging it on my cubicle wall in the mid-2000s, once you get used to using a GTD workflow map, evaluating items that come into your work or personal life will become lightning fast. Eventually, making decisions will become second nature to you, and you can trust your trusted system every day.