What are the five steps of the Getting Things Done method?

Capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage. Capture everything that has your attention, decide what each item means and its next action, put reminders where they belong, review the whole system weekly, and then choose what to do with confidence.

Can you use GTD with a kanban board?

Yes. To Do holds the inbox and backlog, Next Up holds next actions, In Progress is what you are doing now, and Completed holds finished and discarded items. Contexts and projects become labels you filter by.

How do GTD contexts work on a board?

Make each context a category, such as Calls, Computer or Errands, and filter Next Up by the context you are in. Keep to three or four contexts until a list grows long enough to need splitting.

How long should a GTD weekly review take?

On a board, about twenty minutes: empty your inboxes and clarify new cards, walk In Progress and the waiting-for cards, check every project has a card in Next Up, and read the someday/maybe cards.

Getting Things Done (GTD) on a Kanban Board

David Allen’s Getting Things Done method has five steps and a weekly review, and all of it fits on a board with four lanes. How each step maps to a lane, how contexts and projects become labels, what the weekly review looks like on a board, and what changes when a team and its AI assistants share it.

September 29, 20267 min read

The Getting Things Done method, David Allen’s GTD, runs everything that has your attention through five steps: capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage. On a kanban board with four lanes, capture and clarify happen in To Do, the next actions you have committed to sit in Next Up, what you are doing now is In Progress, and finished or discarded work goes to Completed. GTD’s contexts become categories, its projects become projects, and the weekly review becomes a twenty-minute walk across the board. The mapping, lane by lane, and what a shared board adds for a team and for AI assistants, are below.

If you want the board idea on its own, without GTD, start with personal kanban. For a simpler work system built on the same lanes, see how to organize tasks at work. This guide is for people who already like GTD and want it on a board.

The five steps of the GTD method

The official What is GTD (opens in a new tab) page gives each step one line. They are worth reading in Allen’s own words, because each one maps to something specific on a board:

Capture: “Write, record, or gather any and everything that has your attention into a collection tool.”
Clarify: “Is it actionable? If so, decide the next action and project (if more than one action is required). If not, decide if it is trash, reference, or something to put on hold.”
Organize: “Park reminders of your categorized content in appropriate places.”
Reflect: “Update and review all pertinent system contents to regain control and focus.”
Engage: “Use your trusted system to make action decisions with confidence and clarity.”

Mapping GTD to four lanes

A GTD system is a set of lists: an inbox, next actions, projects, waiting for, someday/maybe. A board replaces most of those lists with positions. Here is one mapping that holds up:

To Do is the inbox and the backlog. A card captured but not yet clarified has no category; once clarified, it gets one. Filter To Do to “Uncategorized” and you are looking at your inbox.
Next Up is the next actions list: things you have decided to do, each one a physical action you could start without thinking.
In Progress is Engage: what you are actually doing today. Keep it to two or three cards. The Kanban Guide (opens in a new tab) calls this work in progress, “the number of work items started but not finished,” and a short column is what keeps you finishing instead of starting.
Completed is done, and also GTD’s trash: an item you decide not to do is closed with a reason rather than deleted, so it stops coming back.

Two GTD lists have no lane of their own, and that is fine. Waiting for is a category: a card stays in Next Up or In Progress, labeled “Waiting for,” with who and since when in its note. Someday/maybe is a category in To Do with the lowest priority, so it is kept but never competes. Reference material is not a task at all, and belongs in your files, not on the board.

A GTD board, one card per line

To Do        (inbox)           Look into a standing desk
To Do        Someday/maybe     Learn to sail
Next Up      Calls             Call Dr. Lee's office to move the checkup
Next Up      Computer          Draft the Q3 budget summary for Ana
Next Up      Waiting for       Signed lease from the landlord (asked Sep 22)
In Progress  Computer          Finish the board deck, slides 6-10
Completed    Errands           Pick up the passport photos

Contexts and projects as labels

GTD sorts next actions by context: where you are or what you need to do them, such as calls, computer, errands or office. Allen’s reason, in a piece on why sorting by context matters (opens in a new tab): “Context is also the first criterion that limits your options and keeps you from being reminded of things you simply can’t do.” On a board, a context is a category. Filter Next Up by “Calls” when you have ten minutes and a phone, and nothing else distracts you.

A GTD project is any outcome that takes more than one action: “Move to the new office,” “Hire a bookkeeper.” On a board, that is a project label on each of its cards. The rule that keeps projects alive is simple: every open project has at least one card in Next Up. Filter by project, and if Next Up is empty, the project is stalled, however many cards it has in To Do.

Keep contexts few. Start with three or four, and add one only when a list gets long enough that you skip past half of it.

Clarify: the next action and the two-minute rule

Most of GTD’s value is in the clarify step, and most boards fail there. “Dentist” on a card is a reminder, not an action. Rewrite it as the very next physical action, with a verb: “Call Dr. Lee’s office to move the checkup.” If a card needs several actions, it is a project: give it a project label and create a card for the first action only.

The other half of clarify is Allen’s two-minute rule (opens in a new tab): “Anything you can do in less than two minutes, if you need to do it at all then do it right then.” On a board, that means some captured items never become cards. Tracking them would take longer than doing them.

The weekly review on a board

The official GTD Weekly Review checklist (opens in a new tab) has three phases: Get Clear, Get Current and Get Creative. On a board, each phase is a pass over specific lanes. Twenty minutes, same time each week:

Get Clear. Empty every other inbox (email, notes, chat) onto the board, then clarify every uncategorized card in To Do: a next action with a context, a project, someday/maybe, or closed.
Get Current, lanes. Walk In Progress and move anything you did not touch this week back to Next Up. Check every “Waiting for” card and chase or close it. Mark what finished as Completed.
Get Current, projects. Filter by each project. The checklist asks you to review projects “ensuring at least one current action item on each.” On a board, that means a card in Next Up.
Get Creative. Read the someday/maybe cards. Promote any that have become real, and close the ones you no longer care about.

What a shared board adds for a team

GTD was designed for one person’s head. A team using it on one board gets three things a personal system cannot give:

“Waiting for” becomes visible to the person being waited on. Instead of a private list, the card sits on the shared board with a comment, and the other person sees it.
Projects span people. A project label covers cards owned by different people, and the weekly review checks it once for the whole team.
The clarify step gets a second pair of eyes. A vague card filed by one person is rewritten by whoever triages, and the rewrite is recorded.

It also needs one rule GTD never had to state: each card has exactly one owner. A team member’s next actions are the Next Up cards they own, filtered by their context.

AI assistants in a GTD system

An AI assistant connected to the board is a good capture tool and a useful review assistant, and a poor judge of what matters. Give it the mechanical parts:

Capture. Turn meeting notes, an email thread or a voice memo transcript into cards in To Do, uncategorized, so they land in your inbox rather than your Next Up.
Prepare the weekly review. List every In Progress card untouched for a week, every project with nothing in Next Up, and every “Waiting for” card older than two weeks.
Suggest, do not decide. It can propose a next action and a context in a comment. Moving a card into Next Up is a commitment, and that stays with you.

GTD on fenbs

fenbs has the four lanes fixed: To Do, Next Up, In Progress and Completed. Projects and categories are optional labels made the moment you type a new name, and “Uncategorized” is a real value the board filters by, which is what makes it work as an inbox. Each lane has its own sort, so To Do can sort by Newest while In Progress sorts by Oldest for the weekly review. A card closed without being done is marked Won’t fix, Duplicate, Cannot reproduce or Obsolete, so only real work counts as completed.

Add many takes a pasted list, one task per line, which is how an emptied inbox gets onto the board in one step. AI assistants connect over MCP and can file cards, list them by lane, project or category, and comment; every change they make is recorded in History under their own name. What fenbs lacks for GTD: there are no due dates, no calendar view and no recurring tasks. Keep date-specific actions in your calendar, which the weekly review checklist already has you read, past and upcoming, and keep the review itself as a checklist you read from.

The board idea on its own: personal kanban. A simpler system on the same lanes: how to organize tasks at work. Ranking what is in Next Up: Eisenhower matrix template. A board for one: personal board vs team board. A starting board: personal to-do template.