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Somewhere in a drawer I still own four color-coded folders: Inbox, Action, Waiting, and Someday/Maybe. My ADHD brain’s attempt at running GTD (Getting Things Done) exactly as the book says. I built that system in one manic Sunday afternoon. I was fully convinced this was the year I became a person who Gets Things Done, capital G, capital T, capital D. It lasted eleven days. The Someday/Maybe folder is technically still going, mostly because I put things in it and never look again. People keep telling me that’s not actually the point.
I’ve read GTD five times and finished the system zero times
I own two editions. I’ve highlighted both. Every January for four years running, I’ve opened a fresh notebook. I draw the little flowchart from memory and start again at step one: capture everything. That part I’m great at. My ADHD brain generates loose ends the way other people generate laundry. Constant. Low-effort. Everywhere. Capturing them was never the issue.
The issue showed up around week two, at the weekly review. The whole system runs on that one ritual. You sit down, you look at every list, you re-sort what’s stale, you trust the lists again. I did it once. Maybe twice. Then a week got busy. I skipped the review, and every list I’d built quietly stopped meaning anything. Not because the lists were wrong. A system that depends on one habit holding steady every week was never going to survive a brain that doesn’t do steady.
GTD assumes a brain that doesn’t lose the thread
Getting Things Done runs on a loop: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage. Every step hands off cleanly to the next one. The whole thing only works if each handoff actually happens: reliably, on schedule, without ever dropping the thread. That’s not a flaw in the book. David Allen built it for how his own brain runs, and by every account it runs like that consistently. Mine doesn’t. My ADHD attention moves in bursts, not a steady conveyor belt. A system with five sequential steps gives it five separate places to wander off unnoticed.
So the folders sat there. Fully organized, perfectly labeled, completely dead the moment the review stopped happening. Which is a very expensive way to build a system for forgetting things on purpose.
What I threw out completely
GTD’s Waiting-For list was the first to go. The idea is good on paper: track everything you’re blocked on so nothing falls through. In practice it meant a second list to remember to check. That defeated the entire purpose of writing things down in the first place.
The Someday/Maybe list went next, for the opposite reason. It was too easy to check, and it became a very well-organized place to avoid deciding anything, ever.
Then there’s the areas-of-focus review (the part where you zoom out monthly and rate your life in categories like Health, Career, and Home). I dropped it without a single pang of guilt. Reflection isn’t the problem. A monthly ritual is exactly the kind of thing that stops happening on a brain that doesn’t track time the way a calendar assumes it will. If that sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it. And a system that breaks the moment one ritual slips was never really a system. Just a streak I hadn’t lost yet.
The one rule that actually stuck
Chapter two buries the one idea I never stopped using, past the folders and the flowcharts: name the next physical action. Not the project. The literal next thing your hands would do.
“Plan the trip” sits on a list for three weeks, untouched. There’s no task there, just a whole folder of decisions wearing a task’s outfit. You finish “Open Skyscanner and check flight prices for the week of the 12th” in the same sitting you wrote it, because there’s nothing left to decide.
It holds up everywhere I’ve tested it. “Deal with the car” turns into “Call the garage and ask if Thursday works.” “Sort out the kids’ school stuff” turns into “Find the permission slip and put it by the door.” I’ve carried “work on the website” on a list for entire seasons. It turns into “Open the homepage file and fix the one broken link I already know about.” Every single time, the vague version sits there untouched. I finish the specific version within the hour. The brain isn’t skipping the task out of avoidance. It’s skipping the task because nobody wrote down a next action small enough to start, just a project-shaped fog wearing a deadline. This is basically the whole story of task initiation for an ADHD brain: the deciding is the hard part, not the doing.
This is the same reason a pre-decided list works better than an open question when you’re stuck. Deciding costs more than doing, most days. Once I started rewriting every vague task as one small, physical, already-decided first step, my to-do list changed. It stopped being a list of guilt. It became a list of things I could actually start.
The other idea I quietly kept
There’s a second thing worth stealing even if you drop the rest of the system entirely: the two-minute rule. If the next action takes less than two minutes, do it the second you think of it instead of writing it down. Reply to the text. Put the mug in the dishwasher. Book the appointment. It sounds too small to matter. That’s exactly why it works. It’s one of the only pieces of advice I’ve found that doesn’t require remembering it later, planning around it, or trusting a system to hold it for you. You just do the thing, right now, and it’s off the list before it ever had to go on one.
What I actually kept, four years later
No folders. No weekly review ritual I have to protect like an appointment with myself I’ll inevitably cancel. Just two habits from GTD. Before anything goes on today’s list, I rewrite it as a next physical action. If it takes under two minutes, it skips the list entirely. Not “clean the kitchen.” “Clear the counter by the sink.” Not “reply to emails.” “Reply to the one from Tuesday first.” Two ideas out of a 267-page system. They’re the only two I’ve never dropped.
It’s also, not coincidentally, why my planner has a five-line weekly list instead of an open page. Five slots is small enough to catch a vague task before it even goes on the page. I rewrite it on the spot. There’s no room to hide a fog-shaped project between the lines.
If you want the full case for it, in David Allen’s own words and with the flowcharts I clearly still can’t quit: Getting Things Done is here. Read it for chapter two. Let yourself skip the folders.
The folders are still in the drawer, by the way. I keep meaning to throw them out. That would require deciding on a next physical action for “deal with the folders,” and see above.
Pink Lobster Creatives is run by Liesbeth, a surface pattern designer building the tools she wished she’d had 10 years ago. Everything here comes from lived experience rather than a medical qualification. Nothing on this blog is a substitute for advice from your doctor, therapist, or ADHD coach. Strategies that work for one person with ADHD may not work for another. If something resonates, take it. If it doesn’t, leave it.
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