The inbox for an engineering leader never empties. Slack threads, half-finished performance reviews, a conversation from Tuesday you still haven’t followed up on. You show up to a 1:1 and can’t remember what you committed to in the last one. None of it goes away.
The instinct is to buy a better tool. I’ve been through most of them — Todoist, Evernote, Things 3, Notion, OmniFocus. OmniFocus is where I landed and it genuinely works. But here’s what cycling through all of them taught me: the tool is not the system. A good app holds your tasks. It won’t tell you what to do with them or make sure nothing is slipping. Without a structure underneath, it’s just a more organized place for things to pile up.
The actual problem is something David Allen identified long before any of these apps existed: open loops.
Allen’s definition in Getting Things Done is precise: “Most of the stress people experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments they make or accept.” An open loop is any commitment you haven’t decided what to do with — the email you didn’t action, the request you agreed to but haven’t scheduled. They follow you. They surface mid-conversation, during focused work, at 11pm. GTD is a system for getting them out of your head and into somewhere you trust.
The things that nag you aren’t hard. They’re just undecided.
The framework has five steps. They sound obvious until you try to actually do them.
Capture means writing everything down, immediately, in one place. Allen: “There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.” If you don’t capture something the moment it lands, you’re betting on memory, and memory isn’t reliable at this volume.
Clarify is where most systems fall over. For everything you’ve captured, ask whether it’s actionable. If not — trash it, file it, or park it as “someday/maybe.” If yes, identify the very next physical action required to move it forward. “Finalize Q3 hiring plan” is not an action. “Draft the job description for the senior backend role” is. That distinction is why some leaders are always making progress while others are perpetually busy without knowing why.
Organize puts everything in its place — actions sorted by context, projects tracked, reference material filed where you can find it. One list deserves special mention for leaders: the “waiting for” list. Everything you’ve delegated and are expecting back lives here. Most leaders either micromanage because they don’t trust handoffs, or let delegated work disappear entirely. The waiting for list threads that needle — you’ve handed something off, it’s tracked, and your weekly review will surface it if it hasn’t moved.
Reflect is the weekly review: a recurring block where you process what’s accumulated and make sure the system still reflects reality. Most people skip this. That’s why their lists go stale, they stop trusting them, and quietly go back to trying to remember things. A system you don’t trust is one you don’t use.
Engage is the payoff. When everything is captured, clarified, and current, choosing what to do next takes seconds. You look at what you have time for, what you have energy for, what matters most. You pick something and do it without second-guessing whether something has slipped — because you know it hasn’t.
When the team I was running doubled in size, things started slipping — a follow-up that came a week late, a decision that stalled because nobody remembered who owned it. The math is different at this level. When an engineer drops something, they carry the cost. When a VP drops something, a team does. GTD didn’t fix that by making me more disciplined. It worked because it’s designed around how attention actually functions.
Allen’s observation that there’s “usually an inverse proportion between how much something is on your mind and how much it’s getting done” is the most useful sentence I’ve read about productivity. The things that nag aren’t unfinished because they’re hard. They’re unfinished because you haven’t decided what to do with them. Make the decision. Put it somewhere. Stop carrying it.
Read the book. And if you want to compare notes on how any of this works in practice — the right capture setup, which tool actually holds up at scale, how to protect a weekly review when everything feels urgent — reach out. I’d like to hear how you’re thinking about it.
David Allen — Getting Things Done