How about a list of projects, a list of next actions, and that's it? One piece of paper written on both sides.

I don't know of an official beginner's version, but my usual advice is to really take the time to build it up gradually. Things like:

- Start with plain paper or plain text files, and only add gadgetry when something isn't working. I've tried a zillion different organizers and outliners and sketched out designs for a few new ones. It's a great way to make no progress.

- Really make a habit of collecting everything before you worry about building the perfect taxonomy of @40MillionDifferentThings. When you've got a hardwired instinct that never lets you say "oh, I'm sure I'll remember that later", then you can move on to the next step.

- The above is not a license to not do any actions. But the power of actions (in The David sense) is that they're tiny things. Sorting everything immediately into six-level-deep hierarchical nested structures is another good way to not get anything done. Focus on developing good (small-scale, with verbs) NAs and work from the NA list until sorting them out further feels like a natural thought process rather than like homework.

- Do today's review, and schedule this week's, but put off the higher-level stuff until the day-to-day feeling of overwhelm is under control. Likewise, write down the Someday/Maybes as a way of getting them out of your head, but don't look at them again until later (if you're really dying to do it, it'll pop up in your mind again).

- If it's going to be a lifetime change and not a band-aid, it's okay to spend days or weeks or months at each stage rather than putting the whole thing in place in a single weekend.

- There is no One True Notebook.

(EDIT: That is, what stevecooper said much more succinctly.)

See, I've tried to introduce the GTD concept to people, but it seems they think it's too much work to do when they already have 40 million things going on.

For me, it's not a big deal since I've already implemented the system, and come up with my own variant of it.

There's some benefit to just reading the damned book and getting a little fired up and jumping in, overwhelming or no. If you can't make the commitment to something biggish, you probably won't end up doing much at all.

Having said that, the Moleskine hack is a good starter version.

My current GTD lofi notebook is very simple and streamlined, and so far it is working well. I revamped it for Jan. 1, so we're still in the early infatuation phase.

I have the front 15 or so pages marked for Waiting, the back 25 or so pages marked for Projects, and the area in between is for NAs. By my eyeball, the NA section is about the same size as the Project section. The very back page is for Someday/Maybes. The sections are marked with post-it flags. If I run out of NA room because I bump into Projects, I can work backwards from the first NA page until I bump into Waiting. Similarly, if I go over a page of Someday/Maybes, I work back until I bump into Projects. Once two sections connect, time to buy new notebook. Obviously I can tweak the allocations next time based on what happens this time.

Simple, neat, self contained and easy to cart around.

Sabreuse, I liked your reply. I'm just getting started and have found myself procrastinating by searching for the "perfect" tools. It was good to see a distillation.

I find this to be a succinct treatise of the GTD book- I have used this page to introduce many people to the overall concepts behind it and to remind myself.

http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/GettingThingsDone

If I had to boil a successful GTD implementation down to just one thing, it would be the weekly review. Everything else is just details. I'm happy if I'm doing a weekly review, even if my lists are a mess (uh... what lists?) or if my calendar is blank (or missing) and my file system is untrustworthy.

Of course, the weekly review is also probably the hardest part of the system as well.

OK, here is GTD Lite--

Take two sheets of paper. On the first paper jot down every action that you can take regarding a project that's immediately important to you.

On the second paper write in block letters EVERYTHING ELSE. Put the second paper in your IN basket.

For me, there were two entry points:

1. Acknowledging that I was unhappy with the state of my procrastination, and aknowledging that I'd be happier if I had the stuff currently in my head archived one day on a "completed list. So, I grasped the outcome visualization concept first.

2. Then I started breaking my projects into achievable hunks. (a. Find phone number, b. find phone, etc.). So, I keyed into the "next action" part.

Just working on these two points brought results satisfying enough to move to to invest further. So now I'm moving incrementally deeper as I go along. But since my initial experiments brought me so much pleasure, I have that visceral goal-post to focus on. If I continue honing my discipline, I feel happy. If I let it go, I start to feel stressed.

I kind of did that by accident, in that I came across GTD while looking for software to manage my outstanding actions better. I've evangelized MyLife Organized elsewhere on this forum today, but the point of this post is that I started by getting my Projects and other demands on my time listed down and in perspective.

That was enough to give me a sufficient sense of release that I could add a new "Organise my Life" project with a clean conscience: buying the David Allen book and gradually implementing more and more of the advice. I'm still not doing GTD properly in some ways - I'm going to try disappearing to a meeting room on my own for two hours to do a weekly review next week, since Friday's scheduled 2hrs (2 to 4pm) turned into 30 minutes at 4:45pm.

The approach in the book is very much an "all or nothing" approach. While I agree that the whole system will maximise the benefits, doing the right bits incrementaly will be more practical for most poeple -especially if, like me, you don't have the luxury of being able to block out time to implement the system.

I came across GTD via various blogs long before I got the book. For me, the thing that turned it from 'seems a nice way to organise things' to 'I want to do this!' was the 'two-minute rule' (if you can do something in two minutes, do it NOW). I found that so liberating -- it got a whole shedload of stupid things done which I'd been putting off for ages.

I then played around with bits of the system -- didn't have the time or space to do it all. The next liberation was the 'someday/maybe' list. The realisation that it was 'OK' to want to do things, but NOT move forward on them.

It was only after those two bits that I really decided to put the effort in to trying to make the whole system work.

So, no grand schemes, no cabinets full of labelled folders. Just a stack of things I'd done in under two minutes and a list of projects I wasn't working on! Seems like a pretty 'lite' version to me.

Steve

For me it's all about defining Next Actions. If my NAs are defined, life is sweet.

I know it's bad form to reply to one's own posts, but...

I realise (and did at the time) that these two aspects were not the main core of GTD, but implementing just those two was such an improvement that I made the time to buy and read the book and have a go at the rest of the system. Hope that makes things a little clearer.

Steve

Piece of paper with project list

For each project, a piece of paper with actions and "next action" highlighted somehow.

Mind-mapping as an organizational and note-taking tool. This fits my brain well, and if you like it too, it helps a lot.