Getting Things Done has held up better than almost any productivity system, and the core of it is genuinely good.
Capture everything so nothing is held in your head. Decide the next physical action for each thing. Organise by context. Review weekly. That's a coherent method, it's been refined for two decades, and the parts that work are still the best answer to the problem they address.
The question is which problem, because it isn't the one most people have with goals.
What GTD is extremely good at
Three things, and they're not small.
Getting things out of your head. The observation that unfinished commitments occupy attention until they're recorded somewhere trusted is correct and useful, and capture is the single highest-value habit in the whole method.
Next physical actions. This is the durable insight. Sort out the pension is not a task; find the login for the old provider is. Converting a category into a physical action is the fix for the most common cause of stalling, and GTD makes it a discipline rather than an accident.
Volume. For someone with a hundred and forty live commitments across work and life, the system is a genuine answer. Contexts, lists, and a weekly processing session are how you handle that much without dropping things, and there isn't a better one.
It's worth noticing that all three of those are about commitments — things you've agreed to, mostly involving other people, mostly with a consequence attached. That's the material the system was designed around, and it's a different substance from a goal you set yourself and nobody is expecting.
What it doesn't address
The goal that's been quiet for four months, and which nothing in the system will surface as a problem.
GTD is a horizontal system: it manages everything at the level of actions and projects, and it treats them evenhandedly. That's exactly right for commitments and exactly wrong for the thing you care about most, which will sit somewhere in the middle of a project list being processed politely for a year.
Three specific gaps.
Nothing measures neglect. A project with a valid next action, sitting in a list, never appears as a problem. It's correctly filed. The system's definition of health is that everything has a next action defined, and a project can satisfy that indefinitely while nothing whatsoever happens.
Nothing distinguishes avoidance from waiting. There's a waiting-for list, which is good, but it's a container rather than a diagnosis — it records that you're waiting and says nothing about whether the waiting stopped being real three weeks ago.
Nothing asks whether the goal is right. The someday/maybe list is where things go to be reviewed rather than to be decided about, and in practice it becomes an archive nobody culls. GTD is a system for doing what you've committed to. It has very little to say about whether the commitment should still exist.
The processing problem
There's also a practical failure that's widely experienced and rarely admitted.
The system requires maintenance, and the maintenance is proportional to the volume it's handling. Miss two weekly reviews and the inbox is at ninety items, the lists are stale, and the next-actions describe a situation from a month ago. Returning means an unpleasant afternoon of processing before any work happens.
That's an accumulating system, and accumulating systems punish exactly the periods when you had no capacity — which is when the goals most needed looking at. A lot of lapsed GTD users describe the same thing: it worked beautifully until a hard month, and then the arrears made returning too expensive.
The defence
The counter-argument, because this criticism is often made lazily.
GTD never claimed to be a goal system. Allen's model has explicit higher horizons — areas of focus, one to two year goals, three to five year vision, purpose — and the acknowledged difficulty is that nobody does them. The runway level is where all the energy goes, because it's the level with the immediate relief in it.
So the honest version isn't that GTD ignores goals. It's that the part of GTD dealing with goals is the part that gets abandoned first, reliably, by almost everyone who adopts it — which is a real finding about the method even if it isn't a flaw in the theory.
And for its actual job, nothing has replaced it. If you're dropping commitments, GTD is the answer, and no amount of thinking about drift will help you remember the thing you promised on Tuesday.
What to add
The two systems solve different problems and can sit next to each other.
Keep capture and next actions for commitments — the hundred and forty things, the ones with deadlines and other people attached.
Then keep a separate, much shorter list for the three or four things you actually care about, measured by silence rather than by whether a next action exists. That list answers a different question: not what should I do now, but what have I not touched in three weeks.
The difference matters because those two lists behave nothing alike. Commitments go wrong by being forgotten. Goals go wrong by being politely maintained in a list while quietly dying, and only a measure of neglect catches that.
Fourteen months in a project list
Write the surveying book sits in his project list with a valid next action: draft the section on damp.
It's correctly filed. It appears in every weekly review, gets a moment's attention, and stays. The next action is still valid, so nothing in the system flags anything — the project is, by GTD's definition, healthy.
Fourteen months later the next action is unchanged. It's been read aloud in fifty weekly reviews. Not once has anything asked why the same physical action has been available and undone since the previous spring.
A measure of silence would have said 40 days, then 90, then 400, and would have put it at the top of a very short list every single time he opened it.
Both facts were true throughout. Only one of them was being measured.
That's the case for running both. GTD keeps you from dropping what you promised. Something measuring silence keeps you from politely maintaining the thing you actually wanted, in a list, for fourteen months.
Related: The anatomy of a stuck goal · Review by gap, not by list · A system that assumes you'll disappear
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