GTD in an outliner

David Allen's Getting Things Done boils down to a promise: if every open loop lives in a system you trust, your head is free to actually work. The method's five steps — capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage — map onto an outliner with almost suspicious precision, because GTD's data structure is a tree: projects contain next actions, areas contain projects, someday/maybe is a branch you deliberately don't look at.

The skeleton

Five top-level branches are enough. Resist the urge to build more taxonomy before you have lived in it for two weeks:

• Inbox — make it your first top-level branch and keep it at the very top of the tree, apart from your projects, so capture can't pollute your project structure.
• Projects — one child per project; each project's children are its next actions and notes, nested as deep as reality requires.
• Areas — ongoing responsibilities (health, finances, team) that never "finish."
• Someday / Maybe — ideas you are explicitly allowed to ignore until the weekly review.
• Reference — knowledge worth keeping that isn't actionable.

Capture: the two-second rule

GTD fails at the moment capture costs more than the thought is worth. Zoom into your Inbox branch, press Enter, type, done — no folder choice, no title, no tags. The capture-first method is the foundation this whole setup stands on: the inbox is allowed to be ugly, because nothing in it has been filed yet.

Clarify & organize: triage is tree surgery

Once or twice a day, walk the inbox top to bottom and ask GTD's question of each item: what is this, and what's the next action?

• Actionable and under two minutes → do it now, delete the node.
• Actionable → type /todo on it, then move it under its project. In an outliner this is the whole "filing" step: drag, or cut and paste with the keyboard. Seconds, not minutes.
• A new project → promote the node to the Projects branch and give it a first next-action child.
• Reference → move it under Reference; if it's worth remembering forever, add /card and let spaced repetition carry it.
• Noise → delete without ceremony.

Engage: execute inside the plan

Here is where the outline stops being a filing cabinet. Your next actions live as /todo lines inside the projects they serve — so engaging is just zooming into the project you committed to and walking its actions top to bottom, checking them off in place (⌘Enter cycles a todo's state). There is no "sync your task manager with your notes" problem because there is only one tree.

Reflect: the weekly review, zoomed

The weekly review is where most GTD practices quietly die, usually because it means staring at everything at once. Zoom (⌘.) fixes the dread: walk the Projects branch one project at a time, each one filling the screen alone. Is the next action still right? Did this stall? Promote, demote, prune. Then sweep Someday/Maybe once, asking only "has this become real?"

Twenty minutes, every Friday. The outline makes it mechanical, which is exactly what a habit needs to survive.

Why an outliner beats a task app for GTD

Dedicated task managers model tasks well and context badly: the "why" of a task lives somewhere else, in a doc or a head. In an outliner, the task physically sits inside its reasoning — the meeting notes, the constraints, the half-written plan are its parents and siblings. When priorities shift, you don't update a task list to match reality; you reshape the plan, and the task list is the plan.