GTD in five steps
Capture
We capture anything that catches our attention.
But we do not judge during the collection process, we only capture.
We place what we capture in the Inbox.
Clarify
Clarifying is the process of cleaning the Inbox.
For each item in Inbox, we see if we need to take action.
If we do not need to take action now but may do it in the future, we move it to Someday/Maybe.
If we cannot take action now or in the future, it is probably not a task, so we delete it.
For some other materials that we can use as reference, we move them to the archive.
For the rest of them, they should be executable tasks.
If we can finish a task in two minutes, we act now.
If we cannot do it in two minutes, we see if it needs to be splitted into multiple tasks.
If it needs to be splitted, we turn it into a project.
Organize
For the rest of the tasks, we see if we need to wait for others to do it.
If we need to wait for others, we defer the tasks.
If we do not need to wait, we schedule it on a date.
Then we go back to the project, split it into tasks, and organize these tasks.
We also add execution date, deadline, and tags to the tasks.
Reflect
Periodically review Inbox, Someday/Maybe, Defer, Schedule, Next Step, and project lists.
We can also make modification to tasks in these lists.
Engage
We first take a look at the schedule and see if we have tasks on that day, and do tasks in that day's schedule.
Then we go to the Next Step list, and complete tasks in this list sequentially (up to ourselves).
After that, we go to Someday/Maybe, and move tasks we can do at this point to Next Step, and act.